Customer Reviews

Head First Ajax

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is for people who already know HTML very well and are familiar - but not necessarily experts - with CSS and Javascript. If you are not in that category you should probably check out "Head First HTML and CSS" first. This is not a reference book, but a book for understanding and, more importantly remembering Ajax via an unusual presentation style. That unusual presentation style includes fake interviews, lots of illustrations, and question and answer sessions. You are also presented several designs and shown the right and wrong ways to approach problems. Ajax requires a non-traditional approach to web application design, and head first books are always good at adjusting your thought process as painlessly as possible.

The topics covered include designing Ajax applications, Javascript events, multiple event handlers, asynchronous applications, the document object model and its manipulation, frameworks and toolkits, XML requests and responses, Javascript Standard Object Notation, forms and validations, post requests, leftovers, and utility functions.

I liked this book not only for its casual and fun presentation style, but because it starts explaining Ajax at the beginning and does not get confusing as you go forward. The author knows how to ramp up the difficulty level without you really noticing. Plus, you don't feel like you need half a dozen other books to understand what's going on. The author is clear in her explanation of what the book's limitations are.

First, a preface...I like Head First Books. I feel they make great primers for advanced subjects because of their plain-language approach, the playful fun they have, and the focus on the whys as opposed to a cookbook approach.

Now the review (intended for the 1st edition):

The selected content, and the order presented is excellent. I have little to add that hasn't already been shared by previous reviews.

The editing however is laced with errors. I'm only a third through the text so far and have encountered and corrected 6 significant errors in the code. These are all backed up on the HeadFirst errata page, but I have to ask...where was the editor on this book? If I wasn't very familiar with Javascript, much of this code wouldn't work without debugging.

One example as a case in point:

Beginning on page 118, there's a sequence of instructions and code to get you to build a simple tab animation with images. If you build and test the code as written in the text, it has no hope of working as the code was obviously written with different image names than the ones provided with the downloadable code. (the text has you create code [pg.119] to build image filepaths such as "images/beginnersTop.png", when the file it intends to point to is actually "images/beginnersTabActive.png".

The script I'm referring to is intended to be used as an example of bad coding choices...not bad code. It is there to show options for separating behavior from presentation. Despite that, presenting broken code is just not acceptable.

My advice...good book but wait for the next edition when O-Reilly will have hopefully fixed these errors.

And to the editor...you really dropped the ball on this one. A disappointment in an otherwise exemplary series.

I could not put this book down. I have a decent amount of experience with JavaScript and the DOM, etc., but I always thought of AJAX as something alien that would be difficult to understand. It turns out that this is just a different way of using what I already know. The book is very well organized and helps to make the concepts very understandable.

This book is not for the person learning on their own, or not in a class. Yes, I agree, Head First presentation is humorous, easy to read, etc., but there are many errors in syntax and code in this book. One needs to set up a server on their computer to run the code. In chapter 1 it says there is info in the Appendix "i", "the top ten topics we didn't cover", but there are only five, and the missing five are not online. I thought the problems were with the server I set up, but other code ran fine. The problem was the code itself. I could fix the syntax and typo errors, but being the student, I am not able to correct the code. It took me two days to figure out the code was the problem. When I saw there were errors in the second chapter also, I quit, and went looking for a better text. Maybe it was rushed to press, and not type read, but after a year, you'd expect that at least the files one downloads for the lessons would have been corrected. Head First was Head Dropped on this one.

The actual content of this book is 50% DHTML, 30% application design, and 20% AJAX. And by AJAX, I mean, something that actually involves asynchonous (or synchronous) communication with the server. It could be entitled "Head First DHTML with Ajax." The DHTML lessons are in DOM and javascript/json (of course.) The application design emphasizes separation of content from presentation from behavior. At my level of expertise, I learned more than I thought I would from the non-Ajax topics. I have not read any other book on Ajax, so maybe there just isn't too much to learn about AJAX, so the authors padded material with the 'interactive spirit of AJAX', i.e., DHTML.

I have read another Head First book, Design Patterns, so I anticipated a little fun. This book was not as fun. The word search puzzles have no value; you are not forced to remember what you've learned. I prefer the crosswords of the Design Patterns book.

The authors leave security considerations to the last chapter, where they tell you that you've been doing executing the less secure form of asynchronous communication for the previous 11 chapters. Read the whole book.

I didn't have PHP installed, and installing it was a chore. The book (also Head First/Oreilly websites) gives no clue as to how to install, and executing the first procedure I found online completely disabled my IIS 5.1 server(Window XP OS). There is no instruction in PHP despite the fact that all the async communications are with .php files.

You'll definitely want to hit the errata and forum pages online as there many errors, including plainly incorrect statements in big type.

I imagine that reading this book makes the reader almost dangerous, but you'll need to pick up PHP to really do some damage.

I am a fan of the Head First books. The explanations and examples in Head First Ajax are pretty good. The book helped me understand the concepts, but I was repeatedly frustrated with issues in the exercises. The forums helped with some of the issues, and the final code helped with others. Correct the exercises and this would be another 5 star Head First book.

Yup this is my favorite book on Ajax. I love Head First books but this one far exceeded my expectations.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am a Java programmer with little bit of experience in web technologies. Before reading this book I had used JavaScript libraries such as [...] So Ajax was not a totally brand new technology for me.

I bought this book because for upcoming project, I wanted a deeper understanding of Ajax. Also sometimes, while using Scriptaculous, debugging was not easy, because I didn't know what was really going on behind the scenes.

After reading this book, I have better understanding of Ajax. This doesn't mean I am Ajax expert now and ready to write my own library. I will stick with existing libraries. But I feel this book has given me enough basic concepts of Ajax (and also some general web design concepts) that I can use Ajax libraries without breaking anything unintentionally.

I don't think I will read another book on Ajax unless I am doing some custom Ajax coding.

Any web programmer seeking to learn Ajax will find Rebecca M. Riordan's HEAD FIRST AJAX a user-friendly course in interactive web application programming and the many opportunities offered by Ajax. The actual look of the book is different: it uses the latest findings in cognitive science and learning theory to blend cartoons, drawings, charts, and graphic images into the process, making for a far easier learning method.

In a few minutes, Head First Ajax let you understand the basics of this technology without any trouble. It is a must have for anyone involved on the web development and programming

Excellent product. Head First is a different type of technical writing. If you are looking for books with a lot of code examples this is not the one. But if you are looking for a book that will help you learn the actually concept, how AJAX works, then this is the one. I own multiple titles. They helped me learn C# when I was having trouble. Excellent in teaching. There are code examples such not a ton like other publishers.