Your visual blueprint for creating rich Internet applications
ISBN: 0470043067
Pages: 340
Publisher: Wiley
Topic: Ajax
Rating: 
– (3 out of 5)
This is the first ‘Visual Blueprint’ book I have ever read. The book breaks down every topic into 2 pages, so every time you turn the page you are introduced to a new section. This is difficult to get used to at the start, as you think that some of the topics discussed cannot be covered in 2 pages, but a lot of them can be, and at least the sections are in very bite size sections.
For the beginning chapters I found the content to be very similar to the ‘Dummies Guide to Ajax’ book, with a lot of the examples being exactly the same, but as the book continues original content can be found.
The Ajax book walks you through using Ajax to perform drag and drop operations in a browser, as well as reading and writing to text files and XML files. ‘Ajax’ also includes many pages on both Ajax client side frameworks and server side frameworks that you can download for free and use instead of having to code all the basic Ajax code yourself.
The good thing about this Ajax book is that it includes more information than just about Ajax, it also teaches you how to read XML using Javascript and a lot of other things you can do using Javascript which you may have thought you needed another programming language to complete.
The book finishes off by taking you through the basics of CSS styles and also about the basics of PHP programming, which all come in useful when programming Ajax.
Tyring to fit topics into 2 pages is difficult so on each page there is not much text, but several screenshots of the code, which is a good idea, but it can make the code difficult to read, as the size can be small, although there is a separate companion website containing all the code examples used in the book.
Overall not a bad Ajax book, it should teach you all the basics you need to know about Ajax.