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72 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Taking JavaScript Seriously, October 14, 2005
This review is from: Foundations of Ajax (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)
Ajax is an unusual beast. It's not a product. It's not a standard. It's not a tool. It's not proprietary. And it's not a proper noun -- it's an acronym (although it's usually spelled as if it were a proper noun). Instead, Ajax is a collection of techniques for building highly interactive Web based applications using industrial-strength JavaScript and asynchronous communications, and it's taking the Web development world by storm. This is one of the first books to appear on this very hot topic, and I have to say it's a very good one.
"Foundations of Ajax" takes you through the whys and wherefores of Ajax, as well as the meat and potatoes, at a brisk pace. The examples are crystal clear. One difficulty in describing Ajax applications is that they're inherently multi-language -- part is always JavaScript, and the rest is always written in a server-side language of your choice. Choosing a particular server language might have alienated some readers unfamiliar with it. This book neatly sidesteps the problem by using fixed XML files for the server component for most examples, which leads to startlingly simple descriptions.
As someone who has already learned the basics of Ajax, however, I found the second half of the book even more valuable. The last few chapters talk about tools and techniques for building real-life professional-grade applications. There is excellent, detailed information about documenting, unit testing and debugging for JavaScript, debugging Ajax communications, and using some of the newfangled Ajax frameworks that have begun to appear. These chapters credibly demonstrate that it's possible to treat JavaScript as a Serious Programming Language.
In sum, I think that "Foundations of Ajax" is an excellent piece of work which belongs on every Web developer's bookshelf.
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21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Book for building a foundation on Ajax technology, November 15, 2005
This review is from: Foundations of Ajax (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)
"Foundations of Ajax" is the first book I've read about the technology, regardless of the astonishing hype it has received lately. It was an easy read, I learned a lot, and, while I was left wanting something more, still, I'd say this is a great book for getting started on Ajax.
The first half of the book runs through a quick history of web technologies and gives a pretty balanced view on the "why" and "why not" of Ajax, explains the fundamental technologies and techniques, and showcases some typical Ajax features like auto-completion, auto-refreshing pages, and a file upload progress bar. While at times the pace of the discussion seemed a bit slow even for myself (not being too familiar with JavaScript in general), I found the fundamentals given on XMLHttpRequest and DOM to be very valuable in terms of understanding what's happening "under the hood" when using those fancy Ajaxian features.
The second half of the book is more focused on tooling. The authors have done a huge favor to the reader by showing how to debug and test JavaScript code, although I had to re-read a page or two of the jsUnit chapter after falling off the sled on how and where the tests are actually executed. The first appendix gets an honorary mention as well, as I found the list of cross-browser compatibility tips to be extremely useful.
The downside to the book, in my opinion, is that while the second appendix does enumerate a long list of Ajax frameworks, only Taconite (the authors' own framework) is presented in any detail. Frankly, I would've wanted to see the authors present even short examples of more "mainstream" frameworks such as Dojo and Prototype. Somewhat related to this, while after reading the book, I feel I have a good foundation for Ajax and would certainly be capable of putting together some fancy Ajax widgets, I'm afraid I wouldn't get as much "done" as I could if the book would've allocated more inches on using state-of-the-art Ajax frameworks. Having said that, I knew that that wasn't a goal for the book so it's not really too big an issue for me.
In summary, a great book for building a foundation on Ajax technology. Get it, read it, hack on some JavaScript, and then go learn the latest and greatest Ajax framework.
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43 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
friendly enough introduction, but could have been much better, February 9, 2006
This review is from: Foundations of Ajax (Books for Professionals by Professionals) (Paperback)
This is a rather unambitious book. It's fairly good at what it tries to do, but it doesn't try to do very much. While Manning's Ajax in Action tackles the subject from the standpoint of engineering desktop-replacement applications, Foundations is content to talk about Ajax as a means of adding small-scale usability enhancements to a web application you're already building. Likewise, they assume you already know all you need to know about whatever HTML and about web development platform you're using, and just need to sprinkle some Ajaxy goodness on your site.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. And I have little doubt that there are a lot more people looking to use Ajax to spruce up an existing site or application than looking to build major web-based applications. And lots of those people will already know other aspects of web development and not need a rehash. For these sorts of developers, books like this one will fill an important niche. And Foundations has a lot to recommend it. It's well written and edited, and it has a friendly learning curve. It covers building a toolset for working effectively with JavaScript, like JavaDoc, JsUnit, GreaseMonkey, and Venkman.
The main way in which this book shoots too low is by providing its straightforward examples only for Java on the server side. For a book that clocks in a thin 273 pages, it surely would have been easy to take the 50 pages of Java examples in chapter 4 and provide parallel chapters that implement the same examples in, say, PHP and ASP.Net. If the authors had merely done that, I would have absolutely no hesitation in recommending this book to Ajax newcomers. As it is, I can't help thinking that this book should be called Foundations of Ajax in JavaScript and Java. And since only the simplest of examples (the ones without any server-side interaction) will work on other platforms, this book will be completely useless to a large portion of its target audience. What a shame.
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