Customer Reviews

Ajax and REST Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach

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

 

 

I bought this book thinking I'd have a practical approach on building web applications using REST and Ajax.

From the start, this book almost does not explain what is REST. The book starts verbosely talking about AJAX, DHTML and Web Services with no clear insight. The first steps are testing REST hadn't developed anything yet, it shows code snippets with neither explanation nor context and awful graphics. Two hours after starting reading the book, I feel very dissapointed: no practical advice, no way to build a sample application, a demo, anything like "My First REST Webapp" to have a gratification.

I'm an Appress fan, but this book, from my humble point of view, is horrible.

My title says it all. Hard to read, difficult and poorly chosen examples, bad editing (mistakes all over the place... in code, there's a big difference between a ',' and ';'), have NO IDEA why in a book with this subject, the author discusses table-based layouts (for a NUMBER of pages), the "javascript recipes" section which is just a bad javascript tutorial where the author actually recommends using eval()... I could keep going on, but save yourself the .49c I spent on this book, really, it isn't even worth that. Too bad Amazon requires at least one star.

I cam really close to not buying this book based on the single review that was available. But, poking around the web, reading other reviews, and looking through the table of contents, it appeared to be exactly what I needed to help me complete my current project. When I got the book, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it will indeed fit the bill.

I do agree with the other review that the diagrams are pretty horrible, but they do get the point across.

This book goes a lot more in depth than most "recipe" books, with deeper explanations of solutions, and why the solution was chosen. So there's more learning than simple cut-n-paste solutions.

Please also note that the user level for this book is "intermediate-advanced". If you are just learning about RESTful Web Services, check out RESTful Web Services. Ajax and REST Recipes is more for folks that already have a pretty good handle on REST and want to learn how to put that knowledge to work.

the book is not for beginners , and i did not know this fact until reading the book , for me the book was like davinci code until i google for ajax and rest implementation tutorials , after awhile the picture get clearer , and the book works well for me , and what's interesting about the material is the focus on test driven development , unit testing and building , i recommend it for who already familiar with ajax and rest architecture implementation and had his hands dirty with ajax/rest project before and want to solva the architecture problems .