Head Rush Ajax
Author: Brett McLauglin
ISBN: 0596102259
If you have never been exposed to O'Reilly's Head First book series, you may be in for a surprise. The Head First series titles offer an unorthodox and fun style of delivering content to your doorstep. Just imagine Bill Nye: The Science Guy transformed from the tube to paperback.
While Brett does a great job of explaining Ajax in simple terms, this is not a book you can expect to reference five-six months down the road when searching for more advanced topics. However, anyone familiar with Head First books should already be aware of this. If not, simply take a look at the Sample Chapter and you'll get the idea.
The examples in this book provide a decent overview of how javascript and xml work in unison with PHP scripts. While the sample code focus on web applications were written in PHP, the principles taught are very much applicable to other technologies such as ASP.NET. In the end though, I found myself hungry for more in-depth examples and real-life applications. In other words, you will not expect to find a walk through on how to create Gmail or Google Maps. However, you come to expect those things in books such as Ajax Hacks.
If you were looking for references on how to use an existing Ajax Framework (i.e. Atlas, Sajax, etc), then this is not the book for you. If you are aiming to lay the foundation for your Ajax knowledge and possibly even implementing your own framework, then this is an invaluable read. I give this title full marks for serving its purpose as a Head First book.
Rating: Ub3r 71gh7
May 22, 2006