Customer Reviews

Programming Atlas

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book is outdated. Being fair it is 3 years old, covering a technology that seems to change significantly almost every 3 months. The author has an updated book on the subject -"Programming ASP.NET AJAX: Build rich, Web 2.0-style UI with ASP.NET AJAX"

Microsoft doesn't even use the term Atlas anymore, preferring Ajax like the rest of the industry. The book is so far out of date it has a major chapter on installing the Ajax toolkit with Visual Studio 2005. We now have Visual Studio 2008 and Ajax toolkit comes install with the program.

The parts of the book that explains AJAX, its background are still useful and reading this book would still impart information that would be relevant today. Still, forgo this book and get the updated book - "Programming ASP.NET AJAX: Build rich, Web 2.0-style UI with ASP.NET AJAX"

I found this book to be OK as an introduction, but not very deep on the UpdatePanel, which is one of the core components for Microsoft's AJAX solution. Also, the book is based on the earlier Atlas CTPs, and the newer [...] Betas have drastically changed some things. Worthwhile, but I'm not finding it a reference that I have by my side all the time. Probably should be updated when GA comes out.

If you're not already using Microsoft's new framework for building Ajax-savvy web sites, you should be - and PROGRAMMING ATLAS is the perfect vehicle to take you there. It may look like a 'cookbook' of recipes, but it's not - it's a survey of the underlying technology concepts that make Ajax work, from those most often associated with Ajax to understanding its design and tool intentions. With these basics in hand programmers will find Atlas a snap to master - thanks to PROGRAMMING ATLAS.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Programming Atlas, by Christian Wenz, is a good treatment of the upcoming ASP.NET Ajax release. Microsoft decided to change the name of the product from Atlas to ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax after more than two years in development. Even though the name may be out of date, the material in this book is not.

Wenz does a great job explaning how Ajax works and the role of JavaScript in it. He quickly covers basic JavaScript syntax and moves quickly into client side programming using Atlas. His methods of presenting segmented and documented code examples followed by the complete example is very reinforcing.

The topics covered are broad, including:

Client Side Ajax
Server Side Programming for Ajax
Atlas Controls
Databinding with Atlas
Creating custom components
XML-Script
Ajax.NET

I was confused when I saw the chapter on Ajax.NET. I wouldn't expect to see a chapter on Castle if I bought a book on Spring.NET, or IBatis.NET in a book on NHibernate. It seems the space could have been used for a deeper treatment of other topics.

The book is well written, with very few errors. I would recommend this for anyone who has some development skill, works in .NET 2.0, and does web-client development.

As they've done with most popular technologies, Microsoft took Ajax and wrapped it up into a form that is tightly integrated with their own software framework. The result is what they call Atlas, and it's basically Ajax integrated with ASP.NET. If that's your platform of choice, then you'll likely find a lot of value in the book Programming Atlas by Christian Wenz.

Contents: Atlas, Ajax, and ASP.NET; JavaScript; Ajax; Controls; Data Binding and Validation; Components and Behaviors; Animations; Client Script Library; Using Server Data; Web Services; Extending Controls; Virtual Earth; Web Parts and Gadgets; Atlas Control Toolkit; Using Atlas with Other Server Technologies; Other Ajax Tools; XMLHttpRequest Reference; DOM Reference; Atlas Reference; ScriptManager and UpdatePanel Declarative Reference; Index

From the perspective of someone who is familiar with ASP.NET and wants to start incorporating Ajax-style coding, this book works pretty well. Wenz goes into the different controls provided by Microsoft, and shows how they can be used to save you a lot of time over manual coding. Since Atlas is not yet "gold", he had to work through a lot of this information on his own. The writing shows a pretty deep understanding of what's going on and how to make it work to your advantage. The chapters on JavaScript and Ajax are pretty high-level, so I don't know that I'd recommend this book for someone who isn't already knowledgeable in JavaScript. I think there's a certain level of expertise that needs to be assumed here. I also don't quite see the value of the Using Atlas with Other Server Technologies chapter. A cursory glance at the introductory section makes it sound as if Atlas can be used anywhere as opposed to being tied to Microsoft. While that's true from the standpoint of using/calling other data sources, you appear to lose functionality pretty rapidly if you're not running IIS and ASP.NET. If non-Microsoft platforms are your primary target, I don't think Atlas (or this book) would do much to help you out.

So... If you're already using Visual Studio tools and .NET to program your applications, definitely use Atlas to let Microsoft do the heavy lifting for you. This particular book can help you consolidate all the information that's been written to date on the technology, and allow you to get moving more quickly than you would if you decided to dig it all out via the Web...