Making Existing Sites More Interactive
ISBN: 0596529368
Pages: 380
Publisher: O’Reilly
Topic: Ajax
Rating: 
– (4 out of 5)
The great thing about this book, Adding Ajax is that it teaches you to add Ajax functionality to your website without having to completely re-write your website. This is a good thing as you may not really want a complete Ajax website, as the search engines won’t fully index an ajax site, so adding some parts of Ajax are good as you may want drag and drop functionality or to use Ajax for product reviews or searching on your site.
Ajax allows users to use your site but not have to witness page reloads when you need to show or update data. Ajax is a javascript based technology, which can be integrated with any other programming language which can be called; such languages include PHP and ASP.
The Adding Ajax book begins with a complete overview of Ajax technologies, it also covers ways to develop a strategy for changing your website before you start coding the changes. Ajax libraries that you can download and use are discussed.
One of the major problems of coding websites is that you have to make sure that your website works in all of the main browsers on various operating system platforms, and Adding Ajax covers this problem and makes sure you use events and handlers which will work the same way across various browsers.
The interactive effects chapter contains some cool effects you may want to use in your projects, including creating form filling help, tool tips, creating in page previews of submitted data, colour fades, how to setup timers and tab pages.
There are also other sections in the book about how to signal updates on the screen to users, and how to perform Ajax caching and perform database transactions with Ajax.
There are also sections on how to page through data using Ajax, and examples on how to create a slideshow program. The advanced effects chapter instructs you how to use advanced CSS tricks such as creating rounded corners, build scalable vector graphics and embed SVG graphics.
One of the last chapters is about how to create mashups, which is just taking more than one application and making them work together. Getting Google Maps, Technorati and Flickr to work together are discussed in Adding Ajax.
Overall Adding Ajax is a really good book containing some really good examples of functionality you will want to add to your site, such as drag and drop or adding tool tips etc. If you are looking to add some Ajax to your site take a look at Adding Ajax.