Foundations of Ajax
OK, now for a serious article. Tonight I got to read Foundations of Ajax by Ryan Asleson and Nathaniel Schutta. Though Adminspotting is more sys-admin oriented, you can't go anywhere without hearing the buzzword "Ajax". I'm pretty informed at different web-technologies but I've been skipping out on Ajax. I read this book in hopes of getting a good understanding of it and not just what the hype says.
I definitely reached that goal with this book. Ryan and Nathaniel did a very nice job at putting together an unbiased tutorial of what Ajax is and how to use it. I say unbiased because instead of writing something along the lines of "Just use it! It rules!", they gave, both, the positives and negatives to using Ajax. Throughout the book, they mention how Ajax is not standards compliant yet and how using it the wrong way can hinder a visitors web-viewing. On the other hand, they also write and give great examples at how simple Ajax is to implement in a website.
The book is very short, running just under 300 pages. It starts out with the history of the web and a nice, detailed discussion of what Ajax actually is. The book then goes into the technical basics of Ajax and dives deeper into it's workings from there. The hands-on stuff starts with retrieving simple text files and then moves on to using Java servlets as the server-side data processor. Finally, the last half of the book deals with various javascript topics such as Documenting, Testing, Debugging, and Ajax Frameworks.
Using Java is the only thing I didn't like about this book. The authors explain how you can use any type of server-side technology such as CGI, PHP, and XML-RPC with Ajax for retrieving data. Everyone knows PHP these days -- from beginners to professionals. Personally, I would have used that for the examples.
As the title suggests, this book aims at providing the foundations for Ajax. It's not meant to be (or at least I didn't think so) a definitive guide to the technology. My thoughts are that once you're done with this book, you'll have a clear understanding at what Ajax is, the basics of how to use it, and the ability to move on to more advanced topics. In that way, I'll give this book an 8/10. Two points off for the Java thing.
