AJAX: fast mastery for experienced Web developers!

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.

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

Customer Reviews & Comments
Eichorn's narrative teaches Ajax from scratch. But he writes for a reader already well versed in Web programming. This implies familiarity with HTML and how a Web server responds to http requests. XML knowledge is also needed. Along with how XML data is parsed, by a DOM parser or by XSLT. Actually, for the latter, the book correctly points out its sheer complexity. One nice piece of advice it offers is simply to warn you of this. Oh, knowing JavaScript and PHP also helps. Since JavaScript is the main scripting language on most current browsers. So if you want client side functionality beyond HTML, JavaScript is often the way to go, whether or not you use Ajax. The main thrust of the book is in showing how Ajax works. An ingenious combination of client and server side functionalities. This however has led to the varied requirements described above. The book also warns that Ajax development can bring problems of its own. A useful cautionary note, in light of the recent hype about Ajax. One issue is that using Ajax to alter an existing web site can lead to unexpected changes in usability, and in the very design of the site. Plus, Ajax's production of an application-like feel to the client side on the browser can lead to complex debugging. You don't get those neat extra features at zero cost!