Foundations of Ajax (Foundation)

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

Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide, Second Edition

Programming

Ajax in Action

Format: Paperback
Author: Dave Crane
ReleaseDate: 01 October, 2005
Publisher: Manning Publications
Rating:

This book will answer questions about design and refactoring, security, speed and system resources for Ajax applications
But if you are creating Ajax web applications on a large or small scale and need to consider such aspects as design and refactoring, security, speed and system resources, then this book will help answer some of these questions. If you are looking for some Ajax code to copy and paste into your webpages, this is not the book for you. Although the authors, Dave Crane, Eric Pascarello and Darren James, discuss mostly the client-side of Ajax, their approach for this book is to re-teach web programmers away from the standard/classical webpage and introduce a new way for the server, browser and webpage to work together through Ajax.

The first part of the book concentrates on what Ajax is and how it differs from standard/classical web programming. The authors discuss the four core technologies of Ajax (JavaScript, CSS, DOM and XMLHttpRequest) concentrating on the different ways each is used and how they work together in an Ajax application. Ajax takes the concept of separation of tasks to an advanced level.

Once you are familiar with this new approach to these four preexisting technologies, you are ready to work on refining the coding process. Ajax uses a larger amount of JavaScript compared to classical webpages and the webpages are refreshed less often. The author's approach to managing a large Ajax code base is by design framework and refactoring which is a fancy way of saying they teach you to write small, reusable chunks of code where each chunk has a specific task. They take this code component framework further by using the Model-View-Controller architecture which separates an Ajax application into three parts. The Model is the part that performs the task and the View is the part that presents the results. The Controller is the liaison between the other two. By keeping these parts separate, your code is more reusable and more easily maintained. Changes to one part do not directly affect the other part.

With Ajax, the user does not have that familiar "click and wait" routine as the webpage refreshes to reflect changes. With Ajax, as the information is passed to the server and data is returned to the browser, there is no need to refresh the webpage. Therefore we need new ways to keep the user informed as to the process. A few of the new visual feedback components discussed here are the status bar, pop up dialog and inline highlighting. All of these happen asynchronously.

Many books do not address the topic of security. One thing I liked about this book was that the authors discuss potential security issues when using Ajax and several possible ways to close these security holes. Another area covered was performance issues such as speed and system resources. First you learn ways to monitor the performance of your Ajax application and then how to analyze and improve your code.

The book finishes with five sample projects which are built step-by-step. The first is an Ajax web form. In this project you learn how to use Ajax to link form input fields in such a way as to pre-populate the values (choices) in the form fields. The choice made by the user in one form field causes the values for the second field to be updated as necessary. This can be done without reloading the webpage because the two fields are linked and Ajax does the updating in the background. Next you learn how to create an Ajax type-ahead suggest feature (such as the Google Suggest) and ways to possibly improve on this using an object-oriented TextSuggest component. Moving from forms to more advanced user interface features, you will learn how to create an Ajax portal project such as A9. com, an Ajax based live search system and how Ajax can work with external RSS protocol instead of a server.

The authors first walk you through coding these projects and then show you how to refactor each into reusable components. When you have finished, you should have a code library that you can apply to any Ajax web application.

Dave Crane is a computer programmer and simulation modeller. Eric Pascarello is an ASP. NET developer and the author of JavaScript: Your Visual Blueprint for Building Dynamic Web Pages (2nd ed. ). Darren James is the architect of the open source Rico project.

Good introductory book for budding AJAXian
I am not a Client-side scripting expert, but I found this book feeds a lot basics about Javascript and even CSS. This book is my first AJAX book and frankly speaking this book did keep up its promises with a good introduction and smooth-sailing examples. These scripting langaugaes are important when you are working with Ajax.
The book has lots of examples that you'll find useful to fully understand what is going on. I found I could modify several of the examples and drop them into my own Ajax project. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to get introduced to Ajax programming and could also use a primer on Javascript and CSS.
I may probably buy another one other book on Ajax simply because it is still evolving and not standardized. Thus I feel sure there's more tricks to learn till AJAX hits all parts of the Internet. Worth reading + worth a buy and you will NOT be disappointed.

a must buy book

The "accademic" books are a too much up their own butts, like I am more OO than you. I have bought
Ajax Patterns and Best Practise (accademic),
Foundations of AJAX (accademic),
Professional AJAX (pragmatic)
and Ajax in Action (pragmatic)

Ajax Patterns is good at telling you the kind of patterns to use for different solutions, where as Ajax in Action is a little lighter here but after each chapter the is a Refactoring phase. Like any new Fad, you will always have the scolars/purists padding out a point. The pragmatic books seem to be by real world developers, so you have less include files, better formed objects and useful samples. The WROX download samples are missing so you will have to contact the webmaster. All four books are good in their own way. Eg Patterns is good for designing data factories. None of then cover ASP3. 0 some do Java, PHP or . NET for server side activies. on two books cover XML and only In Action covers SOAP and webservices. The others just use JSON which is not supported in ASP but well in php/ruby/js etc. "Ajax Patterns and Best Practise" is good if you are planning a large project and developing a in house tool kit. But "Professional AJAX" and "Ajax in Action" are ones I use all the time.