Programming Atlas
Author: Christian Wenz
ISBN: 0-596-52672-5
The first half of the book provides good introductory fundamentals on Atlas. In fact, this book would have been perfect for me at the beginning of a major product version release with my last company. Unfortunately, being an earlly adopter of the Atlas framework also meant a more limited amount of resources/references. With several iterations of CTP releases and this book at its side, Atlas documentation is no longer as scarce. Christian Wenz' examples hint at a programmer with a classic ASP background (namely all the inline coding he does). He even goes into providing Google and Amazon web service examples. This gets readers thinking about all the new possibilities, the power of web services and building really cool mashups. I cannot recall seeing a Microsoft Press released title with an image of another organization's logo in the book. In following O'Reilly's open source tradition, despite this being a book on Microsoft technologies, readers will notice that figures are displayed in Mozilla Firefox. Also, a nice feature in this book is that it briefly touches on how you can use Atlas with other technologies (i.e. PHP). I appreciate Christian's style of writing as he makes note of details people don't bother understanding or looking into. For example, He explains how ASP.NET gets around the browser security issue of disallowing XMLHttpRequest objects from connecting with any other domain than the current one. Of the published Atlas references out there, this one is worth the read.
Rating: Ub3r 71gh7
October 19, 2006