Ajax Hacks Book Review

Tips and Tools for Creating Responsive Web Sites

Ajax is one of the newer programming methodologies which allows you to bring changes to the browser without having to have the browser refresh and reload the browser page. Ajax can be used for loading data, sending data, doing drag and drop tasks, validation etc.

There are a number of Ajax books now being published which take you through the programming of Ajax from scratch, but what if you have read these and now want to learn more instead of learning the same things again. That’s where ‘Ajax Hacks’ can come in, as it teaches you exactly the things you need to know and it gets straight to the point in manageable sections. ‘Ajax Hacks’ contains 80 useful hacks, which can be used in any web project.

Luckily if you do need a refresher on how to program Ajax then the first few hacks tell you everything you need to know. The 80 hacks are split into 9 chapters, which are Ajax Basics, Web Forms, Validation, Power Hacks, Direct Web Remoting, Hack Ajax with Rico libraries, Ajax and Ruby on Rails, Savor the script.aculo.us javascript library and finally options and efficiencies.

The great thing about the ‘Ajax Hacks’ book is that many of the hacks are hacks and scripts that you will use again and again in your web projects such as describing how to re-order unordered lists using Ajax, validating postal codes using Ajax, validating credit card numbers using Ajax, validating emails, creating auto complete fields and integrating Google Maps with your web pages using Ajax.

Overall ‘Ajax Hacks’ is well laid out and includes lots of code to type in and numerous screen shots. If you don’t use every hack in the ‘Ajax Hacks’ book then I’m sure you’ll still use this book as a reference and approach it every time you need to complete an Ajax task to see if it’s already covered in the book.