Comments about oreilly Ajax Design Patterns:

Let me get something straight here: Michael Mahemoff really knows how to teach, this book is one of the most appropriated books for those who want to learn about AJAX and in this review I'll tell you why I think so.

First of all, the book starts explaining all the basics of AJAX with its definitons, how it works, related technologies and more. But the best point is: the author always explains using real-life examples, which makes everything easier to understand. The following chapters cover the AJAX Design Patterns properly. You can think about these design patterns as specific solutions, for example "how to made an auto-complete box with ajax", which will give you a great variety of "what can I do with ajax" things. The book also covers some architectural patterns too.

I think the main goal of this book is not only the great diversity of solutions that you can apply in your projects, but how the author explains them. He always starts the explanation of a design pattern with a brief history of how this pattern can help you giving real examples on where these patterns have being applied. Don't forget that one of the main goals of Design Patterns is to create a "vocabulary" to make an easier reference about a specific subject, and this book completely achieves this goal by giving names for each one of those solutions represented as a Design Pattern.

That's why I believe this book is a "must have" for any AJAX professional or student.

Comments about oreilly Ajax Design Patterns:

Ajax Design Patterns is good both as a reference book and for learning new techniques of AJAX development. This book explores many cutting-edge and practical techniques used in developing dynamic web applications. It is easy and enjoyable to read, presenting the material in a clear and concise structure. Its only weakness is its lack of concrete code examples for some patterns. For example, the "Page Rearrangement" pattern briefly discusses how to use CSS and set the coordinates of elements but does not discuss the issue in depth (e.g. potential problems with determining the window size for positioning elements, etc). One of the best parts of the book is the real world examples given for each pattern. Also, the tools for AJAX development discussed are very useful.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone in web design/development, especially those working on dynamic websites.

Comments about oreilly Ajax Design Patterns:

This book does a nice job of combining practical examples of AJAX and the therory behind the "best practices" of AJAX. The idea behind the book is to present a framework for the use of AJAX regardless of the language used to implement that framework. This is ideal for those who use multiple languages or use languages other than the most common. The book is an easy read for those already familiar with making 3-tier apps. The text is well written and well edited.

Comments about oreilly Ajax Design Patterns:

With the sudden popularity of Ajax, books about it started to appear like mushrooms after rain.

I found Ajax to be an exciting technology, but I also found that explaining it requires no more than a handful of pages - not enough for writing a whole book.

That's why, it seems, every book related to Ajax is actually about Ajax and something else: some are about JavaScript, some are about patterns, some mention hacks etc.

The first thing I enjoyed when browsing 'Ajax Design Patterns' at a local bookstore was the respect the author showed towards the reader - clearly the reader was assumed to have solid Software Engineering background (not necessary heavy on HTML, XML or JavaScript). I found a couple of other Ajax books I browsed at the store quite irrelevant to a professional software engineer (the one example that comes to mind: explaining the meaning of the assignment (=) operator, and how that is different from the compare (==) operator, well, you get the point).

In any way this book is a lot about Ajax, which I appreciate, as it was the reason I needed it for, but also a lot about web design patterns, which are not strictly related to Ajax (some of those patterns can use JavaScript with minimal or no communications to the server, for example).

In summary, this book is excellent reading on Ajax and on Web/UI design; in particular, next to every design pattern, there are innumerable references to actual web sites using that pattern.

Several tools and examples are available for download from this site, which should be a boost to create my first few Ajax applications.

Finally, a large number of tools available to Ajax developers are listed as added bonus.

One area which I would like to see a bit more developed is the server side - true, there are lots of published works on SOAP, AXIS etc, but it would be nice to have a bit more about Ajax-related server side technologies in a client Ajax-related book (this book does offer server-side tips and examples but on a minimal scale, using simple PHP examples).