Ajax in Practice
- Paperback: 456 pages
- Publisher: Manning Publications (May 30, 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1932394990
- ISBN-13: 978-1932394993
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
Ajax in Practice provides example-rich coverage of Ajax packed with ready-to-use code and practical recipes for common and not-so-common tasks. Ajax developers now face the move from Ajax-as-theory to Ajax-in-practice. Ajax in Practice guides web developers through the transition from learning about Ajax to successfully applying Ajax-driven techniques in real-world development scenarios. Ajax gives web developers the potential to create rich user-centered internet applications. But Ajax also adds a new level of complexity and sophistication to those applications. Ajax in Practice tackles Ajax head-on, providing countless hands-on techniques and tons of reusable code to address the specific issues developers face when building Ajax-driven solutions.
After a brief overview of Ajax, this book takes the reader through dozens of working examples, all presented in an easy-to-use cookbook format. Readers will learn how to implement drag-and-drop interfaces and will discover how to create effective nagigation strategies for their applications. Unlike a traditional cookbook, though, Ajax in Practice provides a thorough discussion of each technique presented and shows how the individual components can be connected to create powerful solutions. A fun “mash-up” chapter concludes the book. Throughout Ajax in Practice, the examples chosen are interesting, entertaining, and practical.
It’s still showing as ‘available for pre-order’, but I’m sitting next to a box of hard copies in my office, so it’s definitely left the printers and should be with you soon if you’ve pre-ordered.
I’m on the JavaRanch this week answering questions about the book, and excited to see it in print at last. One reader has asked me this morning why the book changed it’s name from ‘P & S Quickly’ to ‘P & S in Action’ at the last minute, so let me tell you the story behind that.
I’d started using the Prototype & Scriptaculous libraries in my production code a while ago, and realised that they were changing the way that I wrote Javascript. Not just that I was using a new API, but that the authors of these libraries had really figured out how Javascript worked as a language, and had created a set of tools that allowed very fluid and expressive code. As with “Ajax in Action”, my primary motivation for writing was to chronicle and share my own journey as a coder, and I thought this would be a good subject for a book. Manning’s ‘Quickly’ series are intended to be short and focused, and that was the kind of book that I had originally planned to write.
As the journey progressed, I realised that there was a lot of context around these libraries. To grok Prototype, you need to grok Javascript’s closures, object literals and other language features, so I ended up writing a comprehensive overview of Javascript the language (something I’d always meant to do, but not necessarily on this project).
Scriptaculous is all about useability and ease of use, so I felt the book needed something about that too. And when exploring Ajax (little Ajax, the request-response bit, as oposed to big Ajax, the whole shooting match), I wanted to measure the impacts of different solutions on network traffic, and render them as charts, so I show you how to do that too.
All of these serve to explain the P & S libraries more fully. I’m not interested in writing a dry API guide, I want to explain why the libraries exist, and how you can use them in the real world. But, having done all of this, with a great deal of help from Bear, and latterly Tom, the book was no longer ‘Quick’. And so, we present to you… Prototype & Scriptaculous in Action!