Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: too much drivel
Comment: There is some good technical content here but the fluffy writing style is extremely irritating. Consider the following paragraph:
"Regardless of the name they call it by, people either love or hate JavaScript, which is probably why opinions range from it being either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the tool of the devil. Personally, I believe that cheeseburgers are the greatest thing since sliced bread and that the tool of the devil is cellphones. Nothing worse than enjoying a good cheeseburger, with onion rings on the side, and the damn phone starts playing 'The Monster Mash.' But I digress."
If you enjoy reading drivel like this, buy the book--you'll get your fill.
And then there's the occasional piece of dangerous thinking, for example:
"Nevertheless, it works, which is all that really matters when developing an application."
Really?
The source examples are poorly formatted, making the code unnecessarily difficult to read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A good vacation read, but short on substance
Comment: I read AJAX: Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML by Edmond Woychowsky while on vacation. As it turned out, this was a good book to read on vacation. The author touches on many subjects at a very introductory level, including Javascript, XML, XSLT etc. If you know these subjects at an introductory level, I would suggest another book that is more geared toward AJAX and its uses and less geared toward these building blocks. I think most readers know Javascript has conditional statements and looping capability and so don't need to waste time reading several pages about this.
In fact, who the book is geared toward seems to be part of this book's problem. At some points, I thought the author was writing for an audience fresh out of their first day of Programming 101. At others, I felt he was writing for seasoned professionals.
The book reads well if one is on vacation, but if one is working and wants to know the intermediate or advanced details behind AJAX, this is not that book. In the beginning, I found the SG-1 and Star Trek, etc. analogies and asides amusing, but by page 40 I had had enough of these. The book would be significantly shorter without them, and in the end if I had wanted to be entertained I wouldn't have been reading a book on this subject.
I found the reference material formatted in tables to be useful, and I may well come back to this book for that.
One final point... Where are the electronic versions of the code samples? No CD, no website I can find. I guess my only alternative is to go to Safari and cut n paste. The author really doesn't expect his readers to type by hand his multipage code examples, does he? It is 2006 afterall.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This is a 5-star book!
Comment: I purchased this book full of enthusiasm and began reading and, as soon as the examples appeared, I naturally wanted to try them out. However, the sample code isn't available yet. When I first wrote this review, I dinged two stars for this. Immediately, I received contact from the author who graciously sent me his sample code.
After considerable looking around on the web, I finally discovered that the source code is not scheduled formally speaking to become made available until six months after the initial publication, which was pretty recent (seems like August or September of 2006). Until then, or if you feel you need it before then, you can surely get it from the author whom you can contact via Amazon's friend link (sort of like LinkedIn, but for Amazon). [...]
I started the book by perusing it to see that it covered all the topics I personally knew I would need (I also own Foundations of AJAX and so had some exposure already). When I found I could not get the sample code, I stopped, but had to set it aside for another project anyway. Hence, I'm not giving a lot of good detail in this review. Maybe I'll come back later.
It doesn't appear that they'll let me change the number of stars on this review, so I've modified the title to reflect the rating I would now like to give it. This is based on knowing what I wanted covered, perusing all the chapters noting that what I want is covered as well as noting Ed's style, which I quite like and which I think helps the flow.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An easily-understood, basic guide
Comment: AJAX: CREATING WEB PAGES WITH ASYNCHRONOUS JAVASCRIPT AND XML by Edmond Woychowsky is for web programmers who want to make the most of Ajax's processing powers. From understanding and using back-end code to developing Ajax libraries for code re-use and reference and linking elements with attributes and descriptions, here's an easily-understood, basic guide to not just Ajax, but other open source technologies and how they interact, from Firefox to MySQL.
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Customer Rating:
Summary: A somewhat different approach to presenting Ajax...
Comment: AJAX: Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML by Edmond Woychowsky is one of those book that's entertaining to read, but it's structured somewhat differently that most Ajax books I've read and reviewed.
Contents: Types of Web Pages; Introducing Ajax; HTML/XHTML; JavaScript; Ajax Using HTML and JavaScript; XML; XMLHttpRequest; Ajax Using XML and XMLHttpRequest; XPath; XSLT; Ajax Using XSLT; Better Living Through Code Reuse; Traveling with Ruby on Rails; Traveling Farther with Ruby; The Essential Cross-Browser HTML DOM; Other Items of Interest; Index
Most Ajax books dive into the XMLHttpRequest object pretty quickly, since that's the key element that makes for the unique client/server interaction. From there, the HTML, DOM, and JavaScript elements are filled in. This book takes nearly the opposite tack. The HTML, XML, and JavaScript elements of Ajax are presented first, and you don't get the XMLHttpRequest until you're pretty deep into the material. As such, I almost felt like I was reading a book on web development that just happened to cover Ajax as part of the material. One thing that this book *does* do that's not seen in most Ajax books is build the example application using a substantial amount of relational database access. If you're looking to use Ajax in that type of programming environment or application, this book will help you tie it together a bit better than others. From a pure readability viewpoint, it's pretty entertaining. There's a number of literary and cinematic references that make the material light and conversational.
I'm not sure this would be a title I'd recommend for someone's first exposure to Ajax. It's not as focused as many other offerings out there. But if you're looking for an additional Ajax title or one that talks more about relational database usage, this would fit the bill.
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