Ajax Bible Book Review

Build Interactive Web Applications with Ajax

The Ajax Bible from Wiley is definitely the size of a bible and it instructs you on the basics of programming webpages with Ajax, but it also introduces you to CSS and PHP.

The Ajax Bible is brilliant at showing you how to code each and every topic discussed, as the book re-iterates the basic code again and again which you will see many times, but this is good if you find yourself jumping into a certain section of the book, as then you don’t have to look back and find the snippets of basic code that are required to get all the examples working.

Ajax Bible begins by teaching you the basics of javascript programming. It then introduces you to getting some simple ajax examples working. The book then moves into more advanced ajax examples such as working with Google Suggest, and the classic ajax examples of using drag and drop in a browser.

Ajax Bible also contains a chapter covering ajax and xml, and it tells you how to read xml and display it on screen using ajax as well as how to validate your xml.

The Ajax Bible also contains not just text about ajax, but it also introduces you to using CSS within your ajax web pages. The large chapter that introduces you to PHP covers all the basics of programming in PHP including working with variables, arrays, loops and if then else statements.

The final chapter in the Ajax Bible is about Ajax and Security. This chapter covers protecting against malicious users, protecting passwords using public and private keys, security issues with proxy servers and how to handle usernames and passwords in ajax.

One thing to note about the Ajax Bible is that the author Steven Holzner also wrote the The Dummies Guide to Ajax, and a lot of the early content and examples are the same, you do get more content with this book than the Dummies Guide but you may get annoyed if you already own the Dummies Guide as you already have read a lot of the content.

Overall if you are looking for an introduction to Ajax programming book then please consider the Ajax Bible, but there are many books like this and I have reviewed quite a few of them, so it may be worth looking around at all the ajax books first before deciding upon a purchase, although across all the basic ajax books I have found that a lot of the examples and topics covered are the same, it’s only when you look at more advanced ajax books do you seem to get more varied content.