Ajax for Dummies Book Review

Clean up the speed and appearance of your web applications with ajax

The ‘Dummies’ range of books are great books for beginners who want to learn about certain topics. I have previously read a dummies Search Engine Optimisation book and a basic HTML book both were very good and full of useful content. ‘Ajax for Dummies’ again delivers a great to introduction to Ajax.

The book begins with a useful introduction to javascript, which is important as AJAX is based on the Javascript programming language. ‘Ajax for Dummies’ then introduces you to the basics of Ajax which includes the use of the main XMLHttpRequestObject command and how it is used within Ajax.

After teaching you how to interact with Ajax via javascript and return data back to the browser in real time, the book introduces you to Ajax javascript client frameworks which are libraries which can be downloaded for free, these libraries do most of the leg work for you and make interacting and using Ajax very easy. ‘Ajax for Dummies’ also discusses server side frameworks written in various languages such as PHP which run on your web server and can create the javascript code for you.

‘Ajax for Dummies’ also includes introductions to CSS, XML and the PHP programming language, all are then used in code examples to show how Ajax can be used with CSS to create a dynamic web pages.

There are several good code examples throughout the book, these include how to create drag and drop components in a web page, so that you can drag and drop products into a shopping basket without leaving the screen. There are also other examples including getting data to and from text files and servers.

Overall ‘Ajax for Dummies’ is a great introductory book to Ajax, with lots of code examples and the book has an easy to read layout. As a PHP programmer it would have been nice to see more examples of interaction between Ajax and PHP and MySQL, but this book was written to give an introduction to the language and not an indepth coverage, so for me the next book will have to be an Ajax book which just covers interacting with PHP and databases such as MySQL.