Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Ajax Bible



Build interactive Web applications with Ajax
Create live searches and online spreadsheets
Discover programming mistakes to avoid!
Create blazing-fast Web applications with powerful Ajax

If you think that mastering Ajax is too difficult, guess again. You can create Web applications that look and feel like desktop apps in less time than you think with the comprehensive Ajax instruction in this in-depth book. You'll find easy-to-follow tutorials, hundreds of tips and tricks, and so much practical information that even skilled developers will reach for this book first. Let this Bible be your guide as you jump into the hottest Web programming technology in years.

* Master the fundamentals--JavaScript(r), XML, dynamic HTML, and CSS
* Tie Ajax into Google with the Google(r) API
* Handle simultaneous XMLHttpRequest objects in Ajax
* Use Ajax frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, AjaxTags, and others
* Understand the Document Object Model (DOM)
* Create floating menus and effects with CSS
* Encrypt data over plain HTTP using JavaScript
* Adapt real-world examples to your own programs

Companion Web site

Find all the code used throughout the book at www.wiley.com/go/ajaxbible

User review
Excellent for learning how AJAX works
This book is perfect for learning AJAX from the ground up. It goes into perfect detail with a lot of example code and great explanations. Considering how important AJAX is to web developers today, I consider this to be a must have in my reference books. The one thing I would say is that this book is more of a tutorial than a quick reference, and I would highly recommend getting the JavaScript Bible to go with it as an excellent reference book for everything javascript, including all the AJAX material.

User review
where is the errata?
This book explains the basics of Ajax very well in the first 4 chapters, better than some other beginning Ajax books I've read. I had my first taste of the author's excellent teaching style in his famous `Inside XML` book, and the same style continues in this book. Holzner is good at explaining novel concepts step by step without jumping the gun, so that the asynchronous nature of the Ajax request is understood well by readers who are not familiar with the concept. For that I'd give the book 4 to 5 stars.

Ajax and REST Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach



Ajax and REST Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach will serve all of your Ajax needs, by providing adaptable solutions for common tasks you'll want to implement on web sites using the next generation of Ajax and REST techniques. As a JavaScript developer, your time is precious, so you'll want to solve problems that present themselves in your work as quickly as possible. You can pick up the code provided in this book, adapt it, or plug it straight into your own applications.
The book mainly focuses on illustrating and explaining how to build applications that use JavaScript, Ajax, and REST Web Services, along with some user interface issues. Specifically, the following topics are covered: implementing JavaScript unit tests; explaining the intent of Dynamic Languages, Web Services and SOA; defining and implementing contracts using REST; understanding why JavaScript Functions have state; implementing JavaScript `Generics`, which are a mixture between real Generics and a replacement algorithm; using code blocks; using functions to make decisions; understanding the difference of JavaScript code that behaves like a value type or a reference type; implementing proxies, delegates, mixins, and overloaded functions; implementing a complete Ajax and Web Service architecture; defining a Web Service using REST; handling large or slow or real-time data sets; implementing shopping cart type architectures; and solving the back button problem using Ajax.
Having read this book you will learn how to modularize your web application by decoupling the client from the server. The decoupling allows a client developer to focus on writing the best JavaScript and Ajax code, and a server developer to write the best business and data objects.


User review
Ajax and REST for who know ajax and rest
the book is not for beginners , and i did not know this fact until reading the book , for me the book was like davinci code until i google for ajax and rest implementation tutorials , after awhile the picture get clearer , and the book works well for me , and what's interesting about the material is the focus on test driven development , unit testing and building , i recommend it for who already familiar with ajax and rest architecture implementation and had his hands dirty with ajax/rest project before and want to solva the architecture problems .

User review
Yuck.
My title says it all. Hard to read, difficult and poorly chosen examples, bad editing (mistakes all over the place,,. in code, there's a big difference between a ',' and ';'), have NO IDEA why in a book with this subject, the author discusses table-based layouts (for a NUMBER of pages), the `javascript recipes` section which is just a bad javascript tutorial where the author actually recommends using eval(),,. I could keep going on, but save yourself the .49c I spent on this book, really, it isn't even worth that. Too bad Amazon requires at least one star.

User review
Not Perfect, But Certainly Worth the Price of Admission.
I cam really close to not buying this book based on the single review that was available. But, poking around the web, reading other reviews, and looking through the table of contents, it appeared to be exactly what I needed to help me complete my current project. When I got the book, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it will indeed fit the bill.

I do agree with the other review that the diagrams are pretty horrible, but they do get the point across.

This book goes a lot more in depth than most `recipe` books, with deeper explanations of solutions, and why the solution was chosen. So there's more learning than simple cut-n-paste solutions.

Please also note that the user level for this book is `intermediate-advanced`. If you are just learning about RESTful Web Services, check out RESTful Web Services. Ajax and REST Recipes is more for folks that already have a pretty good handle on REST and want to learn how to put that knowledge to work.

User review
A problem-problem approach
I bought this book thinking I'd have a practical approach on building web applications using REST and Ajax.

From the start, this book almost does not explain what is REST. The book starts verbosely talking about AJAX, DHTML and Web Services with no clear insight. The first steps are testing REST hadn't developed anything yet, it shows code snippets with neither explanation nor context and awful graphics. Two hours after starting reading the book, I feel very dissapointed: no practical advice, no way to build a sample application, a demo, anything like `My First REST Webapp` to have a gratification.

Download link: Ajax and REST Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach