Ajax in Action

Agile Web Development with Rails : A Pragmatic Guide (Pragmatic Programmers)

DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model

Java

Foundations of Ajax (Foundation)

Format: Paperback
Author: Ryan Asleson
ReleaseDate: 14 October, 2005
Publisher: Apress
Rating:

Clear explanations
Nice explanations through all the book and examples that will help you to grab this new way of developing the Web 2. This book describes clearly all the concepts you need to start rolling your AJAX applications.0.

A must have.

AJAX to the rescue...
We appreciated the overview of JavaScript patterns and very much liked the overview of getting your JavaScript development environment in order with tools like: JSDoc, JSLint, JsUnit and GreaseMonkey. We really liked the book as it's real easy to read.

We look forward to next related "Foundations" book: Foundations of Atlas!.

Review: Foundations of Ajax
Schutta
296 pp. Foundations of Ajax
By Ryan Asleson & Nathaniel T., Oct 2005, Apress, Inc.
Review by Dave Myers

As a open source technology consultant for non-profit and community media organizations, my job is to keep on top of emerging "Web 2. 0" and other social media technologies, and then clearly communicate to my clients any potential value these technologies might offer them. So when a buzz started happening around a "new" technology called Ajax a little more than a year ago, naturally I was intrigued.

Ajax (short for Asynchronous Javascript And Xml) isn't really a specific technology as much as it is a novel way of combining already existing technologies that allow developers to extend the user's browser with lightweight mini-applications. This is particularly useful when the goal is to enhance web page responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes. This approach allows users to make changes to interactive web pages without the entire web page needing to reload each time a change is made.

Because of the nature of my work, I found the opening chapter, "Introducing Ajax," very useful for walking me through a brief history of web applications and describing various approaches to building dynamic web pages. The remaining seven chapters provide techniques for communicating back to the server, useful Ajax examples, a toolbox and testing your JavaScript. The appendix covers cross-browser JavaScript and introduces Ajax frameworks.

In all, I found this book quite useful in that it provided me with a much deeper understanding of the advantages (and drawbacks) to using Ajax. A major plus would have been a chapter on incorporating Ajax techniques into some of the more advanced open source content management systems, such as Mambo/Joomla or Drupal. Even so, I think Foundations of Ajax is a worthy introduction to this innovative approach to web app development.

~ Reviewer: David J. Myers | Open Media Center & Open Forest Consortium | Portland, Oregon USA.