Mini-review and competition of Understanding AJAX

Already an experienced Web developer? Apply your skills in today’s fastest-growing area of Web development: AJAX!

Building on what you already know, this fast-paced guide will show you exactly how to create rich, usable Internet applications. Joshua Eichorn teaches through sophisticated code examples, including extensive server-side PHP code.

Overview

What you will learn from this book

You won’t just learn how to code AJAX applications: Eichorn covers the entire development lifecycle, from use cases and design through debugging. He also presents detailed application case studies, including a start-to-finish update of a non-AJAX application that addresses everything from feature improvements to changing usage patterns. Coverage includes:

How AJAX changes the conventional Web development cycle
Problems created by the AJAX paradigm -- and how to avoid them
Adding AJAX to existing Web applications: key considerations
Using core AJAX technologies, including the XMLHttpRequest object
Consuming data returned to an AJAX application using both XSLT and JSON
Building more usable AJAX applications: guidelines and downloadable resources
Use cases: solving real-world problems in the AJAX environment
Libraries and toolkits for simplifying AJAX development, including Sarissa, scriptaculous, and HTML_AJAX
A complete guide to AJAX debugging
Supporting browsers without XMLHttpRequest by using IFrames or cookies
JSON data encoding debugging guide, which covers tools for Firefox and Internet Explorer
A list of libraries, which includes PHP, .NET, Java, and other libraries that can be used with any server language

Who is this book for?

This book is for Web Developers with a basic understanding of JavaScript the DOM, CSS, HTML are required. A basic understanding of PHP is also helpful but isn't manditory. Beginners get a few links in the book that will help them to learn some of the technologies above but the book is mainly intended for intermediate developers.

Conclusion

The writing style and structure of the book make it very pleasent to read. A small downside is the size of the fonts that are used to display code and especially some of the screenshots. The graphics could have been a bit more exiting too but these are just minor shortcomings. The book is well setup and thought out, and the content is very clear and structured, it succeeds at its main goal; Understanding AJAX and will be a worthy addition to your library.

Competition

We've got a brand new mini-review and competition of the Understanding AJAX book.The friendly people of Prentice Hall are giving away 5 books!

All you need to do, to enter the competition is, download the sample PDF and answer the following question:

"What is the maximum size of Cookies?"

Send your answer to this e-mail address, before Thursday the 28th of September 2006. Don't forget to include your post address and phone number (required for international shipping) in the e-mail.