Foundations of Ajax (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

This is a good Ajax book for the Java Developer who is already familiar with dynamic web development with Servlets and JSP. It covers a lot of material including the basics of Ajax that all books discuss: XMLHttpRequest, JSON data format, and XML DOM manipulation (classic Ajax). But it adds some other topics that are missing from other books such as alternative Remote Scripting (ex: iframes), Unit Testing, Web Services, JavaScript packaging, and tool selection.If you like to see code samples, this book has them - they aren't that pretty to look at (the authors don't use a lot of flashy CSS or style tags), but they work. Code samples to common patterns/techniques are included: auto-complete, validation, progress bars, tooltips, etc...What this book lacks is deep discussions. For that, Ajax in Action is better. But where Ajax in Action reads like a college textbook, Foundations reads more like an article written from one developer to another. I own both -- and liked Foundations as a starting point, and I liked Ajax in Action for reference purposes.The book does tend to repeat itself at times, and the authors shamelessly promote their own framework briefly for a few pages (Taconite - which isn't a leading Ajax framework).But overall - its a great starting place for the Java Ajax developer.

This is a rather unambitious book. It's fairly good at what it tries to do, but it doesn't try to do very much. While Manning's Ajax in Action tackles the subject from the standpoint of engineering desktop-replacement applications, Foundations is content to talk about Ajax as a means of adding small-scale usability enhancements to a web application you're already building. Likewise, they assume you already know all you need to know about whatever HTML and about web development platform you're using, and just need to sprinkle some Ajaxy goodness on your site.Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. And I have little doubt that there are a lot more people looking to use Ajax to spruce up an existing site or application than looking to build major web-based applications. And lots of those people will already know other aspects of web development and not need a rehash. For these sorts of developers, books like this one will fill an important niche. And Foundations has a lot to recommend it. It's well written and edited, and it has a friendly learning curve. It covers building a toolset for working effectively with JavaScript, like JavaDoc, JsUnit, GreaseMonkey, and Venkman.The main way in which this book shoots too low is by providing its straightforward examples only for Java on the server side. For a book that clocks in a thin 273 pages, it surely would have been easy to take the 50 pages of Java examples in chapter 4 and provide parallel chapters that implement the same examples in, say, PHP and ASP.Net. If the authors had merely done that, I would have absolutely no hesitation in recommending this book to Ajax newcomers. As it is, I can't help thinking that this book should be called Foundations of Ajax in JavaScript and Java. And since only the simplest of examples (the ones without any server-side interaction) will work on other platforms, this book will be completely useless to a large portion of its target audience. What a shame.

I bought this along with other reads as I was starting my own business out of college. There was a lot of good information and material.

I am half-way through the book, and I must say the text has its strong points but has weaknesses that undermine the impression that authors have taken a solid approach.Strong points:-Well explained Ajax toolbox. Once you go over the basics of ajaxian coding, you are ready to use the tools that open-source community provided (aplenty, I would say) to ease the work. Some of the explanations here are even better than those given on some of the tools/frameworks websites).-Clear and simple coding that makes the point very well. Examples are well designed to show the point that auhors want to make.However, if you try the code yourself you'll be unpleasantly surprised by the fact that some of the examples don't work (chapter 3, the example with the states is one of them).The weak points of this book:-lengthy explanation to how the Web came to being, from the first text browser to commercial web application. Most of chapter 1 is totally unnecessary, unless authors were told to write certain number of pages. If authors aim at the versed web developers as their audience, don't those developers already know all the history? The unnecessary length of debate seems to repeat itself in some other parts of the book where entire groups of paragraphs can be summed up in couple of sentences;-some of the example code is not working, and it doesn't seem that it was tested either since even if you download the source code from the book's website and try it yourself, it won't work. One of those examples does not even involve server-side processing, so it is not the back-end or server or browser. Reviewing and testing the code would be helpfull;-authors exclusively rely on Java server-side technologies for Ajax backend applications, one would wonder if there is any other way to process XMLHttp requests beside Java. Although it is mentioned repeatedly that there are other server-side technologies for processing, there is no example to show it. If you have at least fair knowledge of any of the server-side languages that is not Java, you'd be better off saving your money and stick with the plenty of online tutorials on Ajax interaction with your choice for server-side processing. Any improved version of this book (or downloadable code from the book's website) would have to include at least some non-Java server-side processing examples;Just like the Ajax itself (no new technology, just a new point of view), this book won't show you a new thing- just a different view. Ajax may be a good accompaniment to server-side processing, but isn't a new way of doing things.