Customer Reviews

Head Rush Ajax (Head First)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

If you are a complete beginner with respect to many of the skills needed for Ajax: HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, then this book might be for you. All of the O'reilly Head First/Head Rush series are excellent teaching books and do a wonderful job at teaching skills in small bite-size chunks. Lots of pictures, exercises and games. This is about as fun as a book can get.

But once you've read the book, you'll realize that you really didn't cover much ground at all. 400 pages of Head Rush Ajax is about the same amount of Ajax technical material as 40 pages of Ajax in Action. All those fun pictures and games take up a lot of pages! Only the most basic topics of Ajax are covered. Much of the book is wasted explaining web-development 101 level subjects...

So it wasn't possible for me to give the book 2 different ratings. As a pure beginner's book - this is a 4 or 5 star book. But if you already know HTML, HTTP, DOM, and CSS -- then this book becomes a 2 star Ajax book because it teaches so little about Ajax.

I was casually browsing Ajax books in the local Borders store, and was pleasantly surprised to find Head Rush Ajax. Having been a great fan of Head First Design Patterns, I decided to buy Head Rush Ajax on the spot. But I have to say I was a tad disappointed, and returned the book.

Likes:
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1. For people new to the Head First teaching approach, there's a high probability that they will like and embrace this style. People already familiar with it will know what to expect and won't be disappointed.

2. Each major concept of Ajax (Asynchronous requests, GET, POST, XML, DOM) has been explained in a separate chapter with examples that make sense.

3. The author clearly states that the intention is only to teach the basic minimum needed to understand and build an Ajax application, and he lives up to that promise.

Dislikes:
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1. Even though the author states his intention about teaching the basic minimum early on, he takes far too many pages to do the same. An experienced web developer can easily get all that he/she can from this book in a single day of reading. At the end, I was left with the feeling "Is that it? For all these pages?"

2. On a few occasions, I felt the Head First approach had been stretched way beyond limit. The notion of repeating a piece of information so that it sticks in the brain has been done one time too many. It has been done right in Head First Design Patterns, but not here.

Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym, Ajax, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.
The Ajax technique uses a combination of:
1. XHTML (or HTML), CSS, for marking up and styling information.
2. The DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, especially ECMAScript implementations like JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented.
3. The XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in certain situations, an IFrame object is used instead of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with the web server.
4. XML is commonly used as the format for transferring data back from the server, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML.
Thus, like DHTML, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together.
"Head Rush Ajax" uses the head-first approach that has worked so well in books on Java, Design Patterns, and HTML. This book is aimed at teaching designers, JavaScript programmers, and your 'everyday' web developer about Ajax. Many of the other books on Ajax are focused on little widgets and gadgets and tricks. However, none of them seem to actually talk about the web browser, asynchrony, and really focus on what Ajax is. Ajax may be a combination of technologies that have been around for a while, but that hardly means that everybody really gets what all those technologies are. So this book talks about JavaScript, and the web browser, asynchronous requests, and the Document Object Model, rather than blazing through that in 65 pages and spending 400 pages talking about esoteric user interface patterns and server-side languages. This is a book that a normal web developer or even a motivated designer can pick up, and get some light bulbs to turn on.
Readers will have their first working application before they finish Chapter one. This book skips all the hype, talks about what the web browser is, and how it's a far richer and more important player in web applications - and especially in asynchronous applications - than most people realize.
I highly recommend it to readers who are intimidated with the alphabet soup of acronyms and technologies that web development has become.
Amazon does not show the table of contents, so I do that here with a short description of each chapter:
1. Using Ajax - A short overview of the technology.
2. Speaking the Language - Discusses asynchronous JavaScript. Learn how to send requests on different browsers, master "ready states", "status codes", and some extra dynamic HTML tricks.
3. She Blinded Me with Asynchrony - Learn how to send users' requests to the server while users continue to work while waiting on a response.
4. Web Page Forestry - Using the Document Object Model you start writing code that updates web pages on the fly.
4.5 A Second Helping - Shows more DOM via a nifty DOM-based application. Learn some new event handlers, how to change a node's style, and create a user-friendly dynamic application.
5. Saying More with POST - Eliminates send(null) and shows how to send more data to a server in your asynchronous requests.
6. More Than Words Can Say - Talks about using XML in your requests.
7. A Fight To the Finish - Talks about JSON and XML, two different formats for transmitting data in asynchronous requests.
A.1 Extras - Ajax toolkits
A.2 Ajax and DOM Utilities - Utility code that may have seemed advanced when you first saw it in the book.

I have read or started to read different books on Ajax. This is the first one I have completed. I have been programming javascript,PHP,ASP, database interfaces for over six years. Have been using the DOM model in programming for some time.

No, this does not completely cover DOM, XML, javascript by any means, but it is a good book that shows you how to better utilize them and tie them all together.

But after reading and working through this book I feel I have a much better understanding of what I can do and with my experience and the knowledge I gained from this book, feel that I have a better idea of when to employ it's use. I highly recommend this book for intermediate PHP html javascript programmers. Beginners may like this book and I wouldn't steer them away, but it might be a little above their heads. Experts, what the heck are you looking for a book for anyway. This isn't a reference.

Some of the plusses for me were:
This book used W3C standard compliant code. [ I never want to program browser specific code again ]

I use PHP 4.x. I read one book was coded using PHP 5.x, I started recoding the examples so they would run on PHP 4.x and got tired of that. Then installed a server with PHP 5.x. That helped but my head was still getting around PHP 5.x and what I could use on the servers at work which are still PHP 4.x.

[...] This was more browser independent and gave me some hints on browsers which I don't use all of the time, like Opera and safari.

Warning to others, yes you will need a server which runs PHP to run the code examples. But if I were to choose one scripting language over another I would choose PHP, because people can get the server software to run PHP for free. There are also some sites which have PHP webhosting for a very small amount.

I did at times get tired of the jokes. But I did like some of the different ways he presented information so that I knew I wasn't just reading it, my head was actually thinking about the different uses. It took me a couple of chapters to get in sync with the author, but after I became more comfortable with the format things progressed pretty fast. I finished the book in a weekend. Started Friday night on the first chapter. Did chapters 2,3 part of 4 in 5 hours on Saturday and finished the rest in 6 hours on Sunday. So roughly 14 hours on the whole book.

The Head First Labs crew has done it again in this excellent into to Ajax. The book really gives a great overview of Ajax for both programmers and non-programmers alike. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to pick this up. Although the book covers more PHP than I care for, and not enough of XML as I would like to see, it does an excellent job of covering their bases in a way that's easy to understand. I highly recommend this book to anyone with little to no understanding of Ajax. Let's pretty up the web, people!

The format of this book may not suit everyone but it passes the old man test because that is what I am. I thought at first that the format, breaking all sorts of type-setting conventions and full of equally unconventional illustrations, was too different -- too "MTV-ish" to have a serious learning impact.

Once I grokked the approach, the material and the format combined marvelously. This is not a reference book. Repetition is used as a primary tool here.

Ajax is a cool and elegant way to make Web pages and Web applications more responsive to user input. Ajax is composed of many parts but is not terribly complex. So the book repeats material by coming at it from continuously new angles. You should be able to come away from this book with an integral and global knowledge of Ajax, aware of its capabilities and familiar (through repetition!) with its implementation.

Special feature: by coincidence, I had just decided to give JSON a whirl, despite its barely comprehensible syntax when I got this Ajax book. This book devotes a whole section pitting Ajax as it is normally implemented against the young upstart, JSON. This was a nice surprise and I found the information to be balanced and valuable.

I thank the team who helped the author put this whole thing together.

This book does one good thing, and that is introducing the reader to AJAX.

Compared to other Head First books it is a little more repetitive, takes longer to get the reader's head around the topic at hand and finally it has external requirements for the reader to be successful in going through the book in follow by example mode.

The external requirements of the book are:

1) You need to be able to understand PHP on a very basic level in order to follow through the examples in the book.

2) In order to follow step by step the book, you need to set-up your test box as a WEB/PHP server.

Requirement #1 is not problematic, #2 may be problematic to some folks, to others it may be even fun -- BTW: The page at [...]
I would have given this book four stars for beginners if the instructions for #2 would exist, at least in the head first site, but they are not there yet by 4/10/07.

Additional notes:

- Chapter 3 example runs dog slow in FireFox and does not render properlyin IE7.

You may, like me, be wondering what the 'Head Rush' appelation is all about compared to the 'Head First' series. This is a slimmer book than the 'Head First' series, coming in at 400 pages (compared to 700-800 for the HF series). Also, it's focussed on a smaller topic. Apart from that, though, it's exactly the same format as the HF books, with some old HF characters popping up. HF stalwarts may be surprised to find that Frowning Woman In Denim is absent from this book, though.

As a prerequisite, you need to know HTML and CSS. You should also know a bit of Javascript. Nothing too fancy, just enough syntax to follow variable definitions, loops, conditionals and subroutines. If you don't know JS at all, I think you'll have trouble keeping up. The server side code is all in PHP. I don't know PHP, but it was close enough to Perl that I had no difficulty following it.

You also probably don't want to know too much about Ajax already. In fact, if you've done a lot of Javascript before, you may find the chapter on DOM a bit slow going. You'll find the pace just right if you're someone who's taking their first step in scripting on the browser side.

Brett McLaughlin proves he can do the HF style in this book. No worries there at all. In the first chapter, you could perhaps argue that some of the diagrams are over-annotated and have just too many arrows in them. In previous HF books, it was normally obvious what the flow of the diagrams were. Not so here, in a few places. However, from chapter 2 onwards, things are fine. In fact, the whole thing is a delight, as usual.

HR Ajax covers the basics very well and entertainingly so: what makes Ajax different from standard HTML requests, asynchrony, manipulating the DOM, and using XML versus JSON. Plus it mentions some browser-specific gotchas (including Opera and Safari), and provides very brief introductions to JS libraries like Rico and Prototype. Hardcore JS GUI-masters, this is not the book for you. Newcomers to Ajax, start here. You'll be glad you did.

The top-most declaration on the front page of Head Rush Ajax is "Get it in your brain, FAST". A more appropriate comment would be: "Get it in your brain after taking a tedious journey down a long, winding road". I found some useful information about Ajax, but only after being frustrated by having to wade through an excessive amount of fluff, even if the dog pictured so often is really cute. Head Rush Ajax typically uses about 20 pages to present and explain material that anyone with any coding experience at all can learn in a paragraph or two. So, if you are an absolute beginner, this book might be just the thing, with entertaining inserts to give you a break if you need one. But if you're even a little experienced with html, css, javascript or php you will probably find the pace to be way too SLOW.

The Head Rush series by O'Reilly is great fun! It's a fun and quick way to learn a new topic. They are not reference books
so you will always want to complement them with a "heavy tome". But they are a wonderful way to learn dry, technical subjects.

The book uses PHP so you may find it helpful if you know that language. But since the meat of Ajax is mainly Javascript it's not really necessary.

All the pictures and graphics in the book will give you a great understanding of how the client is talking to the server side and the different request states of Ajax. It can be rather complicated to understand at first. This book gets you through that hurdle with ease.

Many types of web developers may not know about callbacks and asynchronous programming. Here, the diagramming and frequently asked questions will be helpful.

If you don't know Javascript, the book's section on the Document Object Model will get you through the basics. But you will eventually want to buy a JavaScript book.

This book even includes a chapter an SQL Injection. This is not specifically an Ajax problem so it was rather surprising to find this chapter. It is good information though for any web programmer.

Near the end, a chapter talks about XML versus JSON. If you don't know Javascript, you may not understand JSON from this book. But if you catch on quickly by learning from example, you will be ok with the discussion.

The book gives a very quick overview of 3rd party Ajax libraries. Probably not enough in depth to get you started using them but the chapter will at least make you familiar enough with them so that you can go research the ones you like.

This book is going to give you a great foundation to understand how asynchronous programming works, how to make an XMLHTTPRequest, and how to process the response in a callback. Through this book, you will get the big picture of Ajax programming and understand its fundamentals. This book should appeal especially to web developers who only want to know enough to "talk" to the back-end programmers with Ajax.

Once you have the fundamentals from this book, you can then buy another "encyclopedic" book to use as a reference.