Customer Reviews

Ajax in Practice

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

 

 

The back cover says that "Ajax in Practice" is a "second generation" book. The book covers a mix of problem/solution descriptions for common problems, Ajax tips and advanced JavaScript techniques. The cookbook style is useful if you are trying to implement a specific Ajax effect. The book touches on a number of libraries/toolkits where appropriate. It also covers integrating with existing Ajax libraries.

The book assumes you know basic JavaScript, CSS and HTML. If you are new to Ajax, I recommend reading a "first generation" book like "Ajax in Action" first. This book is a lot easier to follow if you have some exposure to Ajax. In particular, the problem/solution style involves learning by reading a lot of code. This is overwhelming on the first shot. I had to pull out my copy of "Ajax in Action" to follow parts of it. While some of the examples are long, they don't include unnecessary code.

I liked that the book has a common flow to it. Even though there are seven authors/contributors, the style is the same and it makes sense. I learned a lot about specific uses of Ajax along with examples/techniques of good Ajax code. This should definitely be the second Ajax book you read!

Ajax is Practice is kind-of the follow-up book on Ajax in Action. Ajax in Action provided the basic fundamental things to know about Ajax. Ajax in Practice goes beyond that and gives you very concrete code snippets and explanation on how to "do things". It's concrete, practical and well-written.

The book is split into 2 different parts. The first part introduces the Ajax fundamentals, Javascript, JSON, XML, XSLT and the Prototype library. The prototype library is used throughout the book. It ends with an overview of the current ajax toolkits available. The first part is 150 pages and just gives you a quick intro and gets you ready for... part 2.

The second part is the main content of the book. Every chapter contains a practical topic which you can use within your ajax application. The topics go from handling events, navigation, undo-ing to drag and drop. Chapter 12 introduces available services and then chapter 13 combines earlier things together and build a quite nice travel reporting program (something we always wanted to have...)

I thoroughly enjoyed ajax in practice. It was very concrete and useful. The knowledge in the chapters can immediately be put in practice. If you're involved with Ajax development, or even just starting, then this book is certainly recommended.

This is the best example-based Ajax book that I have ever read. And I have read around 5 Ajax books and plenty of tutorials.

The book is both an excellent introduction to Ajax and also a complete support for someone who does not have time to read tons of info and just wants to
code. But do not understand that this book is unprofessional of written for "dummies", no, not at all: it is enriched with clear explanations and pictures of almost every example.
I think it is a book about how to successfully apply Ajax-driven techniques in real projects.
Naturally the book starts with a brief overview of Ajax, something like Ajax in 10 minutes, using JSON and XML with Ajax. Then I think the authors want to suggest you something like this: why bother to learn a lot of stuff and reinvent the wheel when you may simply use one or more or the frameworks that are on the market. So they give you an introduction to frameworks like Prototype, Dojo, jQuery and DWR. After reading this you may decide if you are going to use one of these in your projects.
Now as JavaScript is a lot about events and form validations, two whole chapters are dedicated to handling events and form validation and submission. So just need to have a look and copy them into your projects.
And so on for the other chapters, I just want to present two or three: drag and drop, handling the refresh, dealing with latency, or using well know APIs like Google Search API, Flickr photos or services from Amazon or eBay.

My advice: want a quick and efficient way to get in touch with Ajax, buy this one. In parallel, if you want an in depth look and have the necessary time, please read a complete book: Ajax in Action, by Manning too.

Ionel Condor
Cluj, ROMANIA.

This book by Dave Crane, Bear Bibeault and Jord Sonneveld aims to be of a second-generation Ajax book. It should go beyond just explaining the technology and explore in details the different client-side Ajax technologies and show what you can do with them. The target audience is a developer that has already a background of developing web applications and a basic knowledge of JavaScript. I can say that the book achieves its goals and provides practical concepts and code excerpts that can be readily used. For every topic that is discussed in the book, there is a detailed code example that shows how to use it in practice. I like also the fact that the specific goal of important lines are put in evidence in the code examples.

The book is divided in two parts. The first part contains four chapters that present the basic concepts of Ajax. After an introduction, it discusses the various communications techniques like Json or XML. A chapter is then dedicated to object-oriented JavaScript, that the authors present as a must to build scalable Ajax code. Finally, the book takes a closer look at the different JavaScript libraries (Prototype, Dojo and JQuery) used for Ajax applications.

The second part presents the various practices that could be used in client-side programming and are related to Ajax, either directly or indirectly: events, data entry and validation, navigation, drag-and-drop, usability, state management. Each topic is clearly explained in a dedicated chapter. A chapter is also dedicated to integrating outside API like Yahoo! or Google maps. Finally, a last chapter is dedicated to a sample mash-up application.

The code for the very first example in the book (listing 1.1) is wrong, and the forum at the book's website seems to be abandoned (someone pointed out the problem nine months ago, but was never answered). There seem to be other problems with the code as well.