ISBN: 0596101805
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 5
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Summary: The Best Ajax Book!
If you think you know anything about Ajax, you're wrong. After you read this book you'll realize how little you knew. Michael Mahemoff has a PhD in Computer Science, but it might as well be on Ajax since I've never read a book with so much useful information about it. There are about 8 or 9 Ajax books on the market right now and none of them come close to giving the useful information this one does and that is only after reading the first 150 pages. This book really is the complete tutorial and reference to learning and using Ajax properly.
The first 2 chapters go over the basic components of Ajax and some basic code examples different techniques Ajax is used to enhance functionality and usability: live search, progress indicators and the one-second spot highlight. The end of chapter 2 is a kind of teaser of what is to come in explaining some of the patterns that will be discussed with website examples to illustrate how they are done: data grids, suggestion, popup, virtual workspace, browser-side cache, fat client, drag-and-drop, image slideshow, web services, etc.
Chapter 3 focuses on the basics of an ideal Ajax application and some the design principles that programmers should follow such as following web standards, accessibility, bandwidth issues, latency, and graceful degradation, among others. He sets you in the right direction in thinking how you should code your application with all these ideas in mind since proper patterns will give you smoother working applications with fewer problems when it is released into production. It is a very interesting chapter that does not go into much code but is more of a background on the issues that need to be thought about before developing your architecture. Some of these things you may have already read about in various blogs but is put together wonderfully in this early chapter.
Many of the chapters to follow go through various solutions and Michael goes through various techniques ion how to solve it giving the advantages and negatives starting in chapter 4. The first solution is an Ajax App that helps user enter data quickly with instant validation, integrated searches, and dynamic form field updates. Then he asks questions in order to create this application by first giving a background on how standard web apps (flash, java, desktop, etc) have done this in the past and how Ajax can do this now.
This is done throughout the book in covering different patterns with code illustrations, code snippets and web site examples. This is not a book that you can quickly breeze through mid you. It will take some time for you to read and understand everything the author is trying to get across, but you will have a greater understanding of how to use Ajax effectively and you probably will go back to this book time and time again after you finally finish it. I've never encountered a book quite so informative, but I'm so glad I did especially on such a topic such as Ajax that will be around for many years to come.
The end of the book has a great appendix on the many Ajax libraries and frameworks (Backbase, Dojo, Mochikit, OpenRico, Script.aculo.us, Moo.fx, JSON, SAJAX, Atlas.NET,, etc) that are out now.
Very well done.
Summary: Analytical look at Ajax implementations
Very nicely done. The author spends time analyzing the problems various Ajax implementations are trying to solve and abstracts the concepts into a "pattern". I appreciated the author's attempt to allocate an "established use" value to each pattern described, which ranges from "widespread usage" to "purely speculative".
The book is very nicely put together; the analysis and explanations are well thought through. As it is a book on design patterns for Ajax, it is appropriately geared more toward the explanations than code snippets, but there is still plenty of example code and (as expected) plenty to download or view online.
For each of the approximately 70 patterns described, there is a discussion of the factors for why the pattern exists as well as descriptions of solutions and a real-world example or two (or more). While I think calling some of the solutions in the book "design patterns" is a bit generous, it is definately a worthwhile book to pick up if you're looking to understand how to solve a variety of web site issues using Ajax.
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