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Bulletproof Ajax
vBulletin Book Store > vBulletin books beginning with B
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Bulletproof Ajax |
Author: Jeremy Keith
Published: 2007-02-19 |
List price: $39.99
Our price: $23.99
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Usually ships in 24 hours
As of: August 20th, 2008 09:16:21 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 An interesting book
This was very interesting. I don't know if its completely bulletproof, but it IS about as bullet resistant as you can make it. He definitely makes good points in every chapter about building and designing your ajax application.
I recommend you read this book when you are learning ajax. For the advanced developer, I would hope you are using these techniques. You should at least read this to make sure you are using similar techniques.
For the self-taught, I would say to definitely read this book. You'll make it through it in a few days of on and off reading. It took me a week of reading on the train (25 minutes each way, so about 5 hours). I'm still thinking about what he said and analyzing it. This tells me he had some excellent ideas.
A recommended Ajax programming book. Don't let page counts fool you. I have some "Bible" books that are awful, BUT they're 1000 pages.
-T-
A very well explained and example-based introduction to AJAX
I bought this book in order to get an easy and speedy up-to-date with the AJAX buzzword. This book does the job.
It is a short book (less than 200 pages). The writing style is very inviting and easy to read. I actually read it cover to cover easily in a very short time period.
The examples that walk you through are easy to understand and give the feel for the material.
Terms are very well explained. Jargon is explained too, which helps positioning yourself within the hype buzzword soup you read on the web.
The book explains nicely what AJAX is and what it isn't. It explores a few different ways of doing the same thing. It touches the important topics, giving a feel to them and understanding of "their trick". This is just enough to understand the material.
After reading the book I feed confident to be able to do ahead with my work: I have the basic understanding and the terminology so whenever I need something, I know if it is available, or even relevant or not and then can use an on-line resource or a reference book and complement the necessary knowledge to do the task.
I liked the fact that the author doesn't take for granted a specific browser. He explains how to do things in a way that will be compliant with all browsers. I liked the fact that the author promotes fallbacks, that is, alternative things to happen in case JacaScript is not supported, or that a certain operation is not supported. I liked that the examples and explanations are "backward compatibility motivated".
It is clear that the author is not possessed by the technology itself but thinks primarily about the user and the user experience, thus, compliance and backward compatibility are considered, but also feedback on progress and on changes made to the page and other accessibility issues.
I recommend the book as an introduction to the topic.
Focused, Successful
I bought the book to get a better understanding of the back-end basics of Ajax-piggybacked websites. We hear plenty about the compilation of technologies (asynchronous server requests, JavaScript, the DOM, etc.), but until this point I hadn't come across a book that was enticing enough in terms of its credibility now and down the road.
Bulletproof Ajax fills this void - Jeremy Keith adeptly walks through the technology and its components by defining Ajax and its appropriate objectives for a Web that is accessibility-conscious; gives an overview of JavaScript and the DOM; gets to the heart of Ajax by picking apart the XMLHttpRequest; discusses data formats for using Ajax on your site; goes over progressive enhancement (aka Hijax) for creating a site that is entirely usable for someone without JavaScript but that is enhanced for people who do have JavaScript; brings to attention the challenges and difficulties with Ajax; devotes a chapter to Ajax and accessibility; runs through the creation of an entire site (viewable at http://bulletproofajax.com/shop/ ) in PHP (though it's unnecessary to know the language) that utilizes Ajax gracefully using object-oriented programming; and finally discusses Ajax toolkits and frameworks.
Throughout the book, Jeremy uses good coding examples, and works through the idea of progressive enhancement in a way that anticipates the reader's questions of optimal programming practices with Ajax. The book prepares the reader for designing sites in a very reliable, professional, accessible way. And while the book is filled with functional coding samples of the various topics (which are then all pulled together in their completion at the end of the book), this book does *not* try to be the Bible of Ajax to go to for any obscure programming solution that a web programmer might imagine. It presents a methodology and gives the reader the tools for producing that solution on their own - to me, that is one of the great successes of the book.
 A Brief But Thorough Tour of Ajax
A Brief But Thorough Tour of Ajax
Bulletproof Ajax will surprise you at first at its slim 196 pages of content. But as with any book, it's the density of good information and quality of writing that count the most. I find both to be on the mark in both respects. The content is timely, relevant, and very up to date. As we all know, the landscape in web design can make one thing hot and another not in a matter of months. It is a credit to the New Riders/Peachpit group that they could get such a relevant book on shelves while it still packed a punch.
This book is best suited to the newcomer to Ajax that will appreciate the entire survey of how it came to be, how the XMLHttpRequest limitations hold you back from accessing any other domain than the one serving up the page. However, Jeremy quickly shows you the workaround -- JSON and the script tag, which have no such limitations. This is an example of the dense and useful content I said this book is notable for.
The author then explains his methodology for gracefully degrading Ajaxed pages that he calls the "Hijax" approach. You would be right to ask, why do I need the author to tell me about degrading? I just want to Ajax everything on my pages. But the author gives you insight into the hodgepodge of support the various Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers provide, each with their own quirks. This is a real timesaving chapter. Learn from the author's research on this topic.
Lastly, the book gives you a full beginning-to-end tour of applying all you have learned in the book in a chapter they title "Putting it all together." As a "just get me to the code" kind of guy, this is the chapter I immediately turned to when I opened the book for the first time. I definitely think persons new to Ajax will covet this chapter. It assembles all the building blocks for Ajax in a way that will make it click for most developers.
In summary, this book is brief, and not exhaustive, but that's the very reason I purchased it. It doesn't get wordy, the chapters are accurate and information-packed, and the book concludes with a nice bringing-it-all-together example that lets you see a tangible manifestation to everything you have learned. This books comes with my strong commendations.
Excellent Intro to Ajax
Bulletproof Ajax is an excellent intro to Ajax. It covers both coding Ajax and also design issues and other considerations, all in a very clear style. The coding examples start simple and are extended step-by-step so they're easy to follow.
So I heartily recommend it to anyone looking for an easy high-level intro to Ajax.
Two concerns:
The title is odd. You'd think "Bulletproof" would have to do with oh say... bulletproofing. But it doesn't. It's a broad high-level intro.
Jeremy strongly believes that the right approach to incorporating Ajax such that it's not required for the site to be usable. So, if say javascript isn't enabled on the browser the pages still work fine as traditional fetch-new-pages-from-the-server pages. He calls this the "Hijax" approach and the examples are structured this way. To me this makes sense and I wouldn't quibble, but it is a design choice and not the simplest one for starting with and learning Ajax.
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