Customer Rating:  
Summary: seriously lacking
Comment: This book started OK enough, but once it was time to integrate XML around chapter 3, the book fell apart. The examples were heavily based on PHP which is fine if you are a PHP developer which I am not. The chapters are disorganized and hard to follow. I bought this book from Borders a couple of weeks ago and I will return it today to exchange this book for a better one (mine did not come with a CD). On the plus side I did get a good understanding of how Ajax does browser detection and what Ajax does in general, but that is where it ends. IMHO, try another book, don't waste your time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Too Shallow for Beginners and Veterans Alike
Comment: While I did learn a bit about the XMlHttpRequest object from this book, I don't think the Visual Blueprint format was the best way discuss it. The book felt very disorganized and was indeed full of errors.
There were also some chapters that didn't fit into the book. I think it should be a pre-requisite to any AJAX book that the reader know JavaScript, CSS, and some XML. About half of the book was taken by elementary concepts which had very little to do with AJAX. What the reader is left with is a very shallow read. Based on the book's description, it does not deliver what it promises, and when it does, not very well.
Because the book takes such a shallow look at JavaScript, CSS, XML, and PHP, I don't think it suffices for beginners. And because the book is even more shallow with AJAX, I don't think it suffices for veterans either.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fundamental problems
Comment: I've just skimmed through the book, and there are two glaring problems:
1. The layout of the book is horrid. The book condences theory into talking points, to the extent of putting them in their own cute little boxes. Every idea that the author 'fleshes out' is compressed into a two-to-three paragraph blurb, and then code (hard to read as the screenshots are small) is presented, again in their own little boxes. The light blue decoration does not help matters, nor the blue semi-circle present on every righthand page.
2. The good stuff doesn't start until page 62. The introduction is a bit too fanboyish for my liking (Wow, AJAX is just AMAZING!), and the chapter on JavaScript is so laughable it should have been edited out. The author barely touches the basics, and relies on sloppy internal JavaScript to get his functions to work rather than using the cleaner, and perhaps even standard, approach of utilizing external JavaScript files without the use of any JavaScript within the HTML at all.
I'll try to stick it out with this book, but so far the first impression is not favorable.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Okay for beginners
Comment: I was pleased that this book comes with a CD of the examples. I was dissapointed that there wasn't more substance to the book, however. I felt mislead by the book up front. It starts off by giving examples of how AJAX is used, but didn't do as much as I would have like it to do. For example, I wanted to see an example of a set of menus that could be moved around the screen. I saw how to drop an item into another (shopping cart-like), but there was so much more depth this book could have gone into.
For the money, it is a good "how to get started with AJAX," but I'm hard pressed to say I got my money's worth.
This book hits on:
o how to create your first AJAX-enabled pages
o how to learn more about AJAX
This book misses on:
o Layout - it's often unclear what the author is trying to get across.
o Examples - Some of the examples were repeated so many times, I began feeling like I wished I hadn't looked at them.
o Where's the rest? I was left wanting so much more.
I would have given this book a two-star rating except that it is a fair resource for some beginners.
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