7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good reference, but do we really need Atlas books?, September 23, 2006
This review is from: Programming Atlas (Paperback)
Even though Atlas has not yet been officially released, this book is already a late comer to the market. It's been beaten to market by a variety of AJAX texts that included some coverage of Atlas and at least one dedicated Atlas book from Apress. With all the press around Ajax and the huge Microsoft ASP.NET programmers market, putting out a book in the Atlas category is an opportunity that won't be ignored by the major publishing houses. After trying out Atlas for a while during its Community Technology Preview (CTP) release and seeing the fairly extensive documentation and examples released by both Microsoft and the community, I tend to think that it's an opportunity that they might best have chosen to ignore just the same.
Working through Christopher's book, things appeared to be clustered into several sections. Although this is not officially the way the book is broken down, it makes the most sense from a reviewing standpoint:
* Introductory Chapters - Introduction to Atlas, AJAX, JavaScript, and client-side controls. This material takes up the first eight chapters (i.e. half) of the book and the information contained within can largely be garnered elsewhere including articles, books, and the Atlas documentation. If you're not entirely new to AJAX, this section of materials is skimmable or skippable entirely.
* Server-Side Chapters - These chapters cover using server data, custom data sources, Web services, and cross-domain calls using a server proxy. This is by far the best original material in the book and is well worth a read.
* Atlas Implementation Chapters - This section covers the broadest array of topics. Some of it, such as extending controls and using Atlas with Web parts, is very interesting material. Other sections, such as Map mashups (using MapPoint, blah!), and the Atlas control toolkit (great tools, no value added above and beyond MS materials).
* "Other" Chapters - Certainly not what I bought the book for. Using Atlas with PHP, other AJAX tool coverage, although interesting, was put at the tail end of the book for a reason. This material could just have well been made into appendixes or omitted entirely.
All in all, Christopher's writing style is good and he gives adequate coverage to the breadth of Atlas topics. This book might make for a good desk reference but is a tedious end-to-end read. Stick to the documentation or go for more pragmatic materials such as O'Reilly's other offering in this area, Getting Started with Atlas, from their shortcuts series.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Good background but already outdated, November 3, 2006
This review is from: Programming Atlas (Paperback)
This book rovides a good background for understanding what Atlas is, however, since the release of Web Extentions (formerly Atlas) Beta 1.0 it is severly outdated. Most examples no longer work and some discribed features have been eliminated.
Recommendation is to pass on this title and wait for a release version.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
VERY VERY VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!, October 19, 2006
This review is from: Programming Atlas (Paperback)
Are you a web developer? If you are, then this book is for you. Author Christian Wenz, has done an outstanding job of writing a book for developers who are using ASP.NET and would like to take their applications a step further by using the Ajax technology; and, for developers who are using another technology, but are interested in the Atlas framework.
Wenz, begins with an overview of Ajax and the Atlas framework and then covers the installation of Atlas, a review of its structure, and a first simple example. Then, the author conducts a concise introduction to JavaScript. Next, he explains the technologies beyond the hype. The author continues by describing the client-side controls that come with Atlas. He also covers how you can perform declarative data binding, meaning that you can program without having to write code. Next, the author shows you the built-in behaviors of Atlas and how to attach their functionality to client-side controls and components. The author also focuses on graphical effects you can implement with Atlas, including opacity animations and automatic positioning of page elements. Then, he describes how Atlas enriches the functionality of client-side JavaScript by adding new OOP-like features and even re-implementing some classes ofthe.NET Framework so that they can be used on the client side. The author continues by explaining how you connect to databases. He also deals with XML web services. Next, the author focuses on the extender controls in atlas that do what their name suggests. The author also shows you how easy it is to use the Virtual Earth API from Atlas. Then, he shows you ways to reuse Atlas components. Next, the author introduces the Atlas Control Toolkit and shows you how to write custom extender controls. He continues by proving that some parts of the Atlas framework are not tied to ASP.NET 2.0. Finally, he presents alternative ways to use the Ajax technology with ASP.NET, be it with ASP.NET.x or by using ASP.NET 2.0 without Atlas.
This most excellent book is also suitable for JavaScript programmers who would like to avoid some of the headaches caused by the necessity of writing cross-browser code. More importantly, this book will show you how to create professional, dynamic web pages by using the Microsoft Atlas framework.
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