Ajax for Web Application Developers (Developer's Library)

I am web designer and i have a multimedia and web developer company. I buy this book because i think that AJAX is the next generation of code for web API. This book is very good, it talk in developer language and you can learn about AJAX with single excercise.

Kris did a really good job to be developer friendly. Even thought there are some "TODO" list in he sample, the coding style is very clean, show real world Ajax MVC implementation. It could be better if Kris can go little deep, for example, mini-MVC inside view object, feel the "display" will be too heavy if object has lots of events attached. Overall, it's a nice reading.

I have attended Kris Hadlock's presentation in AJAXWORLD Conference & EXPO last week. I am glad I did because I really wanted to learn how to write reusable JavaScript libraries in my projects. His book is all about AJAX but engineering side of it. Why? because I found not many books out there show you how to capture server errors and record them for debugging and improvement in your project. Not many books show you how to implement the back-end for your frond-end applications. Not many books give you real-world examples. "
Ajax for Web Application Developers" does all for you. It's very simple to understand Kris' codings and explanations because his book is neatly coded and implemented the coding standards.

SOURCE CODES: Demonstrated examples in the book can be downloaded from the publisher. All you need to do is to create an account.

I personally have many AJAX books in my library but specifically liked "Ajax for Web Application Developers".

I strongly recommend it to those who are willing to learn in an easy way to create reusable JavaScript object-oriented libraries and understand the AJAX object methodology.

Good luck

Bought the book, liked the author's intent but I ran into one big problem. No source code for the book. I emailed the publisher last week and heard zero back from them.

Note to publishers: Take care of your readers.

I'm afraid customer service is dead. Maybe it has been outsourced.

First, let me agree with the previous reviewer who noted that this isn't an AJAX book for beginners. It isn't. I don't think anyone claimed that it was. It's a book for web application developers seeking to incorporate AJAX technology into web applications. I wouldn't expect a book with that kind of scope to be appropriate for beginners. This one certainly isn't, and I'm glad, having read enough beginner AJAX books that go over what an XmlHttpRequest is and explain some of the commonly used "stupid JavaScript tricks", dropping the names of popular frameworks and toolkits along the way without really supplying much information about them.

Having said that: I've been seeking a book with the scope of this book for quite a while now. Not since Nicholas Zakas' book "Professional JavaScript for Web Developers" (which I still highly recommend) has this kind of in-depth coverage of the inner workings of AJAX been offered up. Zakas' book (only two years old) went into great detail about using Javascript to do all the cool things we now know as "AJAX"... without once using the word. (Two years ago the word "AJAX" hadn't reached its present buzzword saturation level, if it had been used much at all.)

Hadlock revisits the technology now that AJAX and the various toolkits and frameworks supporting it (Dojo, script.aculo.us, Google Web Toolkit, etc.) have become commonplace. He doesn't provide a tutorial on how to use a particular toolkit or framework; instead, he explains how you can write an "engine" of your own. He starts with a good intro to AJAX, including explanations of how to use both XML and JSON in the response, moves on to the basic principles of object-oriented JavaScript, and then provides examples of reusable JavaScript components to include in your own JavaScript/AJAX engine. Whether you're seeking to reinvent the wheel and write such an engine yourself, or just have a hankering to understand how a toolkit like Dojo or script.aculo.us is constructed, this is great information. Where Zakas' book was an all-encompassing head first dive into deep JavaScript, this book is a briefer but still quite thorough tutorial that gets to the critical information quickly.

The book also includes useful chapters on security and best practices.

Where the book is lacking is in its coverage of server-side interaction. While it concentrates on PHP, it provides some examples of connecting to ASP.NET and ColdFusion, but... there's no mention whatsoever about Java/J2EE. (Ryan Asleson's "Pro Ajax and Java Frameworks" does provide that very sort of information, covering Struts, Spring, and JSF.) Still, where this book shines is in its in-depth explanation of how JavaScript/AJAX toolkits work and how you build your own or extend existing ones. This is still the only book I've seen that even attempts to do that.