Professional Ajax

I'm a senior ASP.NET/Web developer with no Ajax experience. This is my first Ajax book. I wanted to learn Ajax from the ground up, not just the Microsoft controls. Our ecommerce site is very highly trafficed and there's no forgiveness for inefficiencies. This book certainly fulfilled my expectations, but it also introduced me to some new worlds of concepts that I did not expect. For instance, the chapter on Ajax Patterns: It's a new way of thinking about Web Development. I'm very impressed with its content. The book is clearly written, the examples are excellent. I am learning a great deal from this book. Nice job guys!

Last year (2006), I plowed through practically every available book on Ajax. This one really stands out for its excellent historical overview of how Ajax grew to exist. It also is one of the few that covers the use of hidden frames and Iframes as an Ajax technique (it has been around longer but is still used widely). The writing is outstanding. If you can only buy one Ajax book, this one should be it. A free copy of chapter 1, "What is Ajax?" is available online at [...]

As a newcomer to Ajax, I cant comment on the coverage but it seemed reasonably comprehensive. But the code walkthroughs were terrific - completely readable, easy to follow and sometimes even quite fun to read. I cant remember reading better code runthroughs ever.

I found this book to be extremely informative. It is written in a clear, engaging style that makes it a pleasure to read. The examples are well constructed, relevant to real world applications, and thoroughly explained. The essential bits of code are highlighted for quick reading. The most irritating thing about web development is cross-browser support, and authors do a great job to making this less intimidating and point readers to libraries to abstract away the differences. Also covered are related JavaScript XML, XPath, XSLT support, web services, RSS/Atom. PHP is the primary server side language used, though they chose .NET/C# for creating a web service. Microsoft's .NET web service tools are excellent, but I would have liked it if the authors had rounded this out with giving the basics of creating a web service using open source solutions. If you want to learn Ajax techniques and related technologies, this book is well worth your time and money.

AJAX is the we technology everybody is talking abot now and its something that you should know if you are a web developer/designer now or want to be. This book starts with a great chapter explaing how AJAX started and what it really is and how it works. Explaining how AJAX really works can be dificult for the beginner and the authors do it wonderfully. The next chapter goes into the basics of AJAX and how to create a very simple example(s) to give the user a solid foundation of how this new technology works (old technology but new way of using it actally). The next chapter goes into Patterns which describes the programming techniques used by AJAX applications. This is a crucial chapter because it is this technique that allows developers to reall understand how to develop dynamic applications with AJAX. Lots of keywords are thrown around (throttling, periodic refreshing, multi-stage downloads, pending requests, etc) and each are excplained in detailed in a very concise manner that does not confuse the reader. The next chapter focuses on the data format that is used to transfer this data (XML, XPath, XSLT) between each other using AJAX. Various techniques with the different browsers are discussed as well as workarounds if needed for the browser differences. The rest of the book covers web services, JSON, widgets, andhte different frameworks that are available to use. A very complete AJAX book that will get any reader ready to se AJAX in their web development work. A must by...