Professional Ajax, 2nd Edition
- ISBN13: 9780470109496
- Condition: USED – LIKE NEW
- Notes:
Product Description
Professional Ajax 2nd Edition provides a developer-level tutorial of Ajax techniques, patterns, and use cases. The book begins by exploring the roots of Ajax, covering how the evolution of the web and new technologies directly led to the development of Ajax techniques. A detailed discussion of how frames, JavaScript, cookies, XML, and XMLHttp requests (XHR) related to Ajax is included. After this introduction, the book moves on to cover the implementation of specifi… More >>
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The book does a good job academically of showing how Ajax has evolved (itself a debatable topic) and how it is used in modern-day applications. The book doesn’t marry the reader to any one particular web development framework, effectively citing examples in PHP, .NET, and JavaServer Pages. Practically, the authors exhibit a proper mix of (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Dynamic HTML and XmlHttpRequests, showing how the technologies are blended for developing next-gen UIs.
There are great discussions of advanced concepts like JSON, REST, and SOAP-based web services and how Ajax is incorporated into them. Also, coding to allow cross-browser compatibility is stressed throughout the book, particularly in instantiating an XMLHTTP object across IE, Firefox, Mozilla and Safari. The authors’ zXml and XParser are cited as two of several third-party libraries to seamlessly pull this off.
Some gems that I found within the book include Chapter 8 – “Web Site Widgets”, which is very helpful, giving practical demonstrations and usable code for several Ajax-driven mini-applications we could all use in our web projects. Chapter 7′s case study of a Google Suggest-style autocomplete text box was very elegant, using JSON as an alternative to XML’s typically verbose payload. Chapter 2 – “Ajax Patterns” also abstracts many of the features common to apps using Ajax (i.e., polling, autosave, incremental updating). All are well done and greatly appreciated.
Syntactically, the authors’ programming style is very clever. While not exhaustively described, the book shows how to feign object-oriented programming in client-side JavaScript, making liberal use of such time-saving coding tricks like faux classes, inline function definitions and prototypes.
In criticism, the one chapter I found to be a letdown was Chapter 5 – “RSS/Atom”, mainly because I’m very involved with work in that space. A terse description of content syndication is presented, but then followed exclusively by an analysis the FooReader.NET web-based RSS aggregator app. It’s nice, but doesn’t take a more holistic view of how Ajax is being used elsewhere. I would have also liked to see examples in emerging platforms, specifically Ruby on Rails and the Ajax support built directly into that web framework.
But overall this is a very good introductory read for experienced programmers wanting to get up to speed on the next big thing in advanced web UI development. I’m a better, more aware, more prepared developer for having read it.
Rating: 4 / 5
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.
Rating: 5 / 5
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.
Rating: 5 / 5
Professional Ajax will enable you to get up to speed with Ajax, the problems that Ajax solves, and common patters for Ajax use. The authors also introduce you to a cross-platform library to ease your own script development. The writing style is clear and no-nonsense.
I was happy to see their approach in explaining scripting techniques. Once to address IE, once to address Mozilla, and once to address the combined approach. I found this to be very helpful, as most sources jumble it all together. I was not happy to see that Opera and Safari were entirely ignored. The world doesn’t need another Ajax app that fails in these browsers!
I was also surprised to see that the book is most definitely not platform-agnostic. At least not to the extent that I was led to believe by the description and comments. Examples are C# and PHP.
Too much time was spent focused on the server side. For example, the web servcies section spent more time showing you how to setup a web service in .Net than it did showing you how to consume it with Ajax. The server side could have been abstracted — in a book about Ajax, the server side is a black box — all that matters is what is sent out, and what is returned. I couldn’t care less about the algorithms used to create the return.
All-in-all, it was a good read. Fast, to the point, concise. I’d also recommend Ajax in Action for a more thorough review of patterns, a look at elegantly creating reusable Ajax components, and coverage of other Ajax-related topics like usage of frameworks.
Rating: 3 / 5
This book is very well done. It is a good introduction to AJAX and gets you up to speed quick.
CONS:
1. Not enough treatment on the server side of things in the beginning chapters. Needed a little more on serializing XML, but then how do you do that in a platform-agnostic way. I was a little disappointed that there were little or no examples in java/jsp/servlet during the Basics, Patterns and XML chapters. Could have used that. Assumes knowledge of PHP.
2. Need a little more treatment of XML/XPath/XSLT. Gets a little bit confusing when the technologies are all combined.
3. I feel like the patterns chapter could have followed the XML/XPath/XSLT chapter.
4. Maybe JSON could be left for the back of the book since the X in AJAX stands for XML. Just a thought.
5. About 65 pages of the book are just on AjaxMail, which has numerous examples, but was a lot of reading to go through on one application.
PROS:
1. Not a beginner’s book. Assumes knowledge of many things, like PHP, network protocols, HTTP, etc. I’m glad a lot of those details were left out and AJAX was focused on.
2. Gets you up and running with good, working examples.
3. The patterns chapter is very helpful in deciding how to use the stuff.
4. Good chapter on widgets.
5. Bang for the buck when talking about the AJAX frameworks that are out there. Fairly good treatment of JPSpan, DWR and AJAX.NET.
Rating: 4 / 5