Customer Reviews

ASP.Net Ajax in Action

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I don't normally give a rave review about books unless I was really satisfied with the book, but this book really is a great book.

First of all, apart from it being an ASP.NET AJAX book, one of things I consider when buying a book is the overall flow of the book - the flows between paragraphs and the flows between chapters. On that note, ASP.NET Ajax in Action has a great flow. Especially the transitions of the book and the divisions of the chapters were well put into the book, so it could feel like reading a novel in some cases.

On the technical side, I like technical books that have a lot of examples that make good sense. This book is full of examples, which is very imporant for understanding a new technology. Another thing I like about th book is the detailed examplanations of the ASP.NET Ajax foundations. For example, it doesn't talk about UpdatePanel until Chatper 6 and 7, which most of ASP.NET developers like to just use for quick development. However, this book does a good job of illustrating the overall architecure of the Ajax framework, and does not neglect that Javascript is also a big part in developing Ajax-enabled websites. Unlike other ASP.NET Ajax books, this book has a few chapters dedicated to client-centric ASP.NET Ajax development, which is necessary for building hard-core ajax sites and components.

To conclude, this book is a must-have for asp.net developers and you can use it as both a reference book and a learning material.

I do a lot of reading, and to the best of my knowledge my personal .NET book collection is bigger than anyone else's. The first thing I noticed about this book is the smooth and highly readable writing style - very rare to see in a technical book. As I read through the chapters it became clear to me that the content was no less stunning than the readability! The charts and tables are not merely a reprint of MSDN, and the authors dominated the subject without making it dry like a reference manual.

It was obviously their goal to ensure that readers already familiar with ASP.NET in general would become a subject expert on AJAX just by studying this book. The real world example code stands alone among the other books: this code works and it is highly relevant instead of being a bunch of contrived example snippets! There is no better book on ASP.NET AJAX.

I am looking for any other books from these authors - I'll order them without even thinking about it. There's a very short list of authors about whom I can make that statement. And I'll keep my eye on the Manning publishing company from now on. They know how to edit books well, and they selected the best authors available.

I had written off ASP.NET AJAX as bloated and for beginners until I bought this excellent book. While I have done AJAX by hand in the past, I'm now a convert to the advantages of leveraging this powerful library. I highly recommend this book both for beginners who want to start with ASP.NET AJAX and those professionals looking to either leverage this library, or to be convinced that they need to.

The book is full of practical examples that I was able to apply immediately to my code, as well as thorough explanations that enabled me to expand on and understand the code provided

I thought this was a nice book till I got to ch 5. It seems that the quality of the whole book goes downhill at this point. In ch 5 I found the sample code wouldnt run. After spending too much time trying to fix it, I went to the author forum and asked for help. Within a few days, one of the authors posted a revised version of the code with updated connection data. Well this code could now connect but it had a slew of new errors. All in all I spent over a day trying to get this sample app work!. When I buy a programming textbook, I expect that code toworking. Being an experienced programmer I can fix typos and small errors, though I shouldnt have to - but difficult errors coupled with the fact that I dont yet properly understand the material just make matters confusing and discouraging. Code problems aside, the book seems to become rather breezy and slapdash from ch 5 on.

There is useful material in this book and it has some value but, overall, its a disappointment

The book is an excellent book because it really describes what exactly happens in the ASP and AJAX post back process, and details the application interface models. It also contains an excellent tutorial for working with Javascript in the context of the Microsoft AJAX implementation with ScriptManager.

While there is a book web site with some updates, I feel that an updated book would be helpful that includes information about working with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and JSON. Perhaps this is already in the works.

This book has some very good segments and the code examples are very well structured, with clever snippets of code, like 'hooking the key down event in chap 6'. However the presentation in some areas is a more a smattering of technology without a application as a basis. In this regard it is a little frustrating. The authors could have benefited with a good proof reader, if not an idea and continuity reader - assuming that there is such a thing. The book is littered with examples without consideration of how you would implement some of the code, for example on page 12 where there is a comment "The value 4 indicates that the request has completed. Well how about a table of the other values - is this all the user needs to implement this technology? This is a very naive and non methodical approach to a book. "Especially the Appendix which is an afterthought I think and leaves the reader hanging during the crucial installation phases of the tools.

I think you should use this book as a I gave up trying to follow it as a coherent narrative, but decided to download the source code and load them up in Visual Studio, and run through the ones that do work and then reference the book. It is unfortunate that where many of the interesting examples around chapter 9, 10, 11 and 12 occur is where things begin to fall apart due to the the need to have compatibility between .NET 2 and 3 even though the book clearly says that they will work with the .NET 2 extensions. It is all a bit of a mess really, with extensions, control kits and so on. One wonders whether you are not just better off grabbing a good book on Ajax Java script implementations and coding your own framework.

Apart from these frustration - buy it for the examples, but make sure you load VS2008 with .NET 3.5 if you are prone to tantrums and outbursts when you come across sample code does not work.

ASP.NET brought its own structure to the task of web development, formalizing some common practices and building a classical Visual/RAD development environment upon them. ASP.NET AJAX brings this into the realm of asynchronous communication, partial page updates, and client scripting. It's hardly the be-all, end-all of client-side development - but for the task of adding a faster, smoother, AJAX-style experience to an existing, postback-heavy ASP.NET site, it is well-developed set of tools.

This is not an AJAX book. It's a book on a framework, one which builds on another framework, and which uses AJAX techniques as a means to its ends. Frameworks change the game: as the name suggests, they're designed and used for the purpose of providing structure, but not necessarily easy access to a specific technology or techique. You will read this book to learn what that structure is, how to use it, and how to work around its limitations.

And you will learn it. This book is ruthless - everything an ASP.NET developer might need to know to move up to AJAX.NET gets pulled in, from a thorough Javascript chapter to basic authentication and cross-site-scripting security to the improvements coming in the forthcoming Orcas release, to common patters for use. I fully expected it to fall into the "tutorial-wrapped reference manual" trap that so many of these books do, but it never does. Nor does it spend too much time on any one topic. We get an introduction, discussion, example, further resources... and on to the next one.

The writing style is formal but not stiff, and relatively free of the sorts of scatter-shot proofing that seem all too common with first-edition technical books. Diagrams and code samples are clear, attractive, and plentiful.

I would recommend this book to anyone thinking about adopting ASP.NET AJAX for their site(s), and especially for anyone coming into a project already using it - I honestly cannot recommend a better resource for getting up to speed on the ins and outs of the framework quickly.

You can find lots of tutorials throughout the net that give you the kind of thing you need - instant coding ideas for the busy developer to complete a task. If you find that you are doing this more than once or twice for a particular discipline, then its time to hunker down with a book and get some background.

This books filled that need for me - it's the perfect introductory text for marrying ajax concepts with those of ASP.NET. They spend just enough time on background information. The examples are plentiful and well explained. This is my first "In Action" book and I am definitely going to become a fan of the series.

This is a great learning tool for those in need of a way to quickly coming up to speed with Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX framework. Although it could benefit those with little JavaScript experience, you will understand things much better and easier by having just a small amount of JavaScript under your belt before starting this book.

This book provides excellent coverage of ASP.NET AJAX and is geared towards the expert ASP.NET developer. Readers who are looking for a lighter introduction to AJAX will get plenty of value out of this book, but they may be better off buying a 24 hour reference book or similar title. But if you need to really use AJAX in the real world I highly recommend this book. The book is well organized, and the chapters build logically on the previous ones. The layout is accessible, so I can use this book as a reference or for in-depth review. I greatly appreciated their coverage of advanced topics thus saving me having to go online as I usually need to do once it's time to apply the technology to the real-world. The only chapter I skipped was on XML script, which is a futures technology that may not eventually be adopted. I would give this book 6 stars if I could because it represents everything that is done right in a technology book. Highly recommended.