Head Rush Ajax

You may, like me, be wondering what the 'Head Rush' appelation is all about compared to the 'Head First' series. This is a slimmer book than the 'Head First' series, coming in at 400 pages (compared to 700-800 for the HF series). Also, it's focussed on a smaller topic. Apart from that, though, it's exactly the same format as the HF books, with some old HF characters popping up. HF stalwarts may be surprised to find that Frowning Woman In Denim is absent from this book, though. As a prerequisite, you need to know HTML and CSS. You should also know a bit of Javascript. Nothing too fancy, just enough syntax to follow variable definitions, loops, conditionals and subroutines. If you don't know JS at all, I think you'll have trouble keeping up. The server side code is all in PHP. I don't know PHP, but it was close enough to Perl that I had no difficulty following it. You also probably don't want to know too much about Ajax already. In fact, if you've done a lot of Javascript before, you may find the chapter on DOM a bit slow going. You'll find the pace just right if you're someone who's taking their first step in scripting on the browser side. Brett McLaughlin proves he can do the HF style in this book. No worries there at all. In the first chapter, you could perhaps argue that some of the diagrams are over-annotated and have just too many arrows in them. In previous HF books, it was normally obvious what the flow of the diagrams were. Not so here, in a few places. However, from chapter 2 onwards, things are fine. In fact, the whole thing is a delight, as usual. HR Ajax covers the basics very well and entertainingly so: what makes Ajax different from standard HTML requests, asynchrony, manipulating the DOM, and using XML versus JSON. Plus it mentions some browser-specific gotchas (including Opera and Safari), and provides very brief introductions to JS libraries like Rico and Prototype. Hardcore JS GUI-masters, this is not the book for you. Newcomers to Ajax, start here. You'll be glad you did.

I have read or started to read different books on Ajax. This is the first one I have completed. I have been programming javascript,PHP,ASP, database interfaces for over six years. Have been using the DOM model in programming for some time. No, this does not completely cover DOM, XML, javascript by any means, but it is a good book that shows you how to better utilize them and tie them all together. But after reading and working through this book I feel I have a much better understanding of what I can do and with my experience and the knowledge I gained from this book, feel that I have a better idea of when to employ it's use. I highly recommend this book for intermediate PHP html javascript programmers. Beginners may like this book and I wouldn't steer them away, but it might be a little above their heads. Experts, what the heck are you looking for a book for anyway. This isn't a reference. Some of the plusses for me were: This book used W3C standard compliant code. [ I never want to program browser specific code again ] I use PHP 4.x. I read one book was coded using PHP 5.x, I started recoding the examples so they would run on PHP 4.x and got tired of that. Then installed a server with PHP 5.x. That helped but my head was still getting around PHP 5.x and what I could use on the servers at work which are still PHP 4.x. [...] This was more browser independent and gave me some hints on browsers which I don't use all of the time, like Opera and safari. Warning to others, yes you will need a server which runs PHP to run the code examples. But if I were to choose one scripting language over another I would choose PHP, because people can get the server software to run PHP for free. There are also some sites which have PHP webhosting for a very small amount. I did at times get tired of the jokes. But I did like some of the different ways he presented information so that I knew I wasn't just reading it, my head was actually thinking about the different uses. It took me a couple of chapters to get in sync with the author, but after I became more comfortable with the format things progressed pretty fast. I finished the book in a weekend. Started Friday night on the first chapter. Did chapters 2,3 part of 4 in 5 hours on Saturday and finished the rest in 6 hours on Sunday. So roughly 14 hours on the whole book.

The format of this book may not suit everyone but it passes the old man test because that is what I am. I thought at first that the format, breaking all sorts of type-setting conventions and full of equally unconventional illustrations, was too different -- too "MTV-ish" to have a serious learning impact. Once I grokked the approach, the material and the format combined marvelously. This is not a reference book. Repetition is used as a primary tool here. Ajax is a cool and elegant way to make Web pages and Web applications more responsive to user input. Ajax is composed of many parts but is not terribly complex. So the book repeats material by coming at it from continuously new angles. You should be able to come away from this book with an integral and global knowledge of Ajax, aware of its capabilities and familiar (through repetition!) with its implementation. Special feature: by coincidence, I had just decided to give JSON a whirl, despite its barely comprehensible syntax when I got this Ajax book. This book devotes a whole section pitting Ajax as it is normally implemented against the young upstart, JSON. This was a nice surprise and I found the information to be balanced and valuable. I thank the team who helped the author put this whole thing together.

The Head First Labs crew has done it again in this excellent into to Ajax. The book really gives a great overview of Ajax for both programmers and non-programmers alike. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to pick this up. Although the book covers more PHP than I care for, and not enough of XML as I would like to see, it does an excellent job of covering their bases in a way that's easy to understand. I highly recommend this book to anyone with little to no understanding of Ajax. Let's pretty up the web, people!