A Brief But Thorough Tour of Ajax

Bulletproof Ajax will surprise you at first at its slim 196 pages of content. But as with any book, it's the density of good information and quality of writing that count the most. I find both to be on the mark in both respects. The content is timely, relevant, and very up to date. As we all know, the landscape in web design can make one thing hot and another not in a matter of months. It is a credit to the New Riders/Peachpit group that they could get such a relevant book on shelves while it still packed a punch.

This book is best suited to the newcomer to Ajax that will appreciate the entire survey of how it came to be, how the XMLHttpRequest limitations hold you back from accessing any other domain than the one serving up the page. However, Jeremy quickly shows you the workaround -- JSON and the script tag, which have no such limitations. This is an example of the dense and useful content I said this book is notable for.

The author then explains his methodology for gracefully degrading Ajaxed pages that he calls the "Hijax" approach. You would be right to ask, why do I need the author to tell me about degrading? I just want to Ajax everything on my pages. But the author gives you insight into the hodgepodge of support the various Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers provide, each with their own quirks. This is a real timesaving chapter. Learn from the author's research on this topic.

Lastly, the book gives you a full beginning-to-end tour of applying all you have learned in the book in a chapter they title "Putting it all together." As a "just get me to the code" kind of guy, this is the chapter I immediately turned to when I opened the book for the first time. I definitely think persons new to Ajax will covet this chapter. It assembles all the building blocks for Ajax in a way that will make it click for most developers.

In summary, this book is brief, and not exhaustive, but that's the very reason I purchased it. It doesn't get wordy, the chapters are accurate and information-packed, and the book concludes with a nice bringing-it-all-together example that lets you see a tangible manifestation to everything you have learned. This books comes with my strong commendations.

Bulletproof Ajax is an excellent intro to Ajax. It covers both coding Ajax and also design issues and other considerations, all in a very clear style. The coding examples start simple and are extended step-by-step so they're easy to follow.

So I heartily recommend it to anyone looking for an easy high-level intro to Ajax.

Two concerns:

The title is odd. You'd think "Bulletproof" would have to do with oh say... bulletproofing. But it doesn't. It's a broad high-level intro.

Jeremy strongly believes that the right approach to incorporating Ajax such that it's not required for the site to be usable. So, if say javascript isn't enabled on the browser the pages still work fine as traditional fetch-new-pages-from-the-server pages. He calls this the "Hijax" approach and the examples are structured this way. To me this makes sense and I wouldn't quibble, but it is a design choice and not the simplest one for starting with and learning Ajax.

This is an outstanding book. It is well written and easy to read and follow. I especially like that the author builds up the examples as he goes along rather than just putting the whole of the example code at the end of the section. It is another well written book from the Friends of Ed.

It you're looking for an introductory book into Ajax, then read this book. Good overall intro about "what Ajax is" and how the term "ajax" came about. Nice Javascript primer, the DOM concepts, and finally bringing it all together for some simple Ajax. Read entire book in one sitting.., reading the DOm Scripting which is a bit more advanced...

Bulletproof Ajax
This is one of the best written AJAX books I have read. Books designs with excellent user experience features like lighter weight book with 300 pages, beautiful designed book cover, and most importantly the paper quality goes from the rough lower graded paper printed in black to coated premium paper printed in color. This is the type of light-weight book I wouldn't mind to carry around to café, put inside my laptop carrier, and even put it next to my pillow. Author took a very practical way to explain AJAX from basic to advance concepts using many code examples. He shared valuable AJAX experience on XML, JSON, and HTML fragment innerHTML. He presented the latest design principles on how to support AJAX across browser types and versions, how to handle AJAX in disabled JavaScript-browsers similar to Progressive Enhancement in CSS, explain HIJAX approach to make AJAX bulletproof, degrade gracefully and maintain accessibility simultaneously. I would trade few AJAX books for one light-weight book that gives me practical tips and tricks in building AJAX-based Web 2.0 applications.