Book review: "Foundations of Ajax"

"Foundations of Ajax"
by Ryan Asleson and Nathanial T. Schutta
published by APress

With so much energy having been pumped into server-side programming over the last five years, the new trend is a return to developing rich clients. I've previously read several of the intermediate-to-advanced titles currently in print, so I appreciated this book's fundamental tone and approach to teaching what Ajax is and how web programmers can use it in their web applications. The book is what one just wanting to get up to speed with the next big thing would expect, and in that regard is very valuable: short chapters, lots of code and examples that can be directly copied into projects.

The main concerns of programming with CSS, XML and JavaScript are dealt with properly. The basic construct used to create an XMLHttpRequest object and work with it is replicated throughout the book, showing how easy it us to get up and running with Ajax. There are a few minor syntactical differences in the coding styles used by either author, but those are minor. The book's first four chapters are really good learning tools towards learning Ajax programming, GET'ing and POST'ing data to the server, and processing both text- and XML-based responses.

The book is very modern, using several up-to-date examples of Ajax programming like those employed by NetFlix and A9, and makes frequent use of sidebars to note cross-browser incompatabilities for those unavoidable DOM quirks. Chapter 4's examples are very useful, pragmatic utilities most sites could use at some point.

The one glaring point of criticism I have is that the book should have been titled "Foundations of Ajax for Java". Not that it's a bad thing, but in contrast to most other books that take a framework-agnostic approach to showing Ajax, often using .NET, PHP, CGI and Java examples, this book sticks with the approach of using servlets (and later, JSPs) to processing remote scripts, and bases the later chapters on testing and debugging on available Java tools. Again, there isn't anything inherently wrong with this, but the approach is a little one-sided for those of us not working in Java shops.

Overall, this is a great read for any programmer at any level, to be followed by other APress titles on Ajax that deal with more advanced JavaScript programming. It also makes a good teaching reference for a classroom setting.