Agylen

Foundations of Ajax, by Ryan Asleson, Nathaniel T. Schutta — Apress.

The Ajax phenomenon is quite new — even though the underlying technologies have been around for years — but in a few months it’s already become mainstream. It’s still in the early-adopters, pre-oreilly-book phase, but some books are already starting to appear. Kudos to Apress for being able to publish a quality product so early.

This is really a foundations book, as the title says. It does a good job of explaining the underpinnings of Ajax, even though the initial chapter on the history of the Internet could have been edited out without much harm. It explains very plainly and clearly the basic Ajax techniques and presents a good overview of some of the best tools available to the Ajaxan craftsman.

Being an introductory text, you can’t really blame the authors for not going too deep into the most complex technical and architectural issue. However, if you already tried doing some simple Ajax applications, there’s not much here that you haven’t probably already read somewhere else. To be honest, there’s a good number of hints, tips, and tricks and many pitfalls are dutifully pointed out, but you are left wondering whether there a more systematic approach wouldn’t have been better suited.

This is the main defect of the book, in my opinion. It feels rather disorganized at times. There just doesn’t seem to be a linear progression from the basic to the more complex issues. Some subjects are barely skimmed over whereas for others (the Venkman debuggers for instance) there’s even too much detail.

In particular, the final chapter on Ajax frameworks would have been great if it hadn’t dedicated just a few lines to each framework.

If it were not for this, I would have given “Foundations of Ajax” a five-star rating. As it stands, it’s only four.