Learn the fundamentals, quickly and clearly
This book does exactly what it claims to do: teach you what Ajax is, and the basics of using it. After finishing this book, I feel like I have an extremely solid base with which to read and understand a more advanced book. This book didn't teach me any best practices, common Ajax patterns, cool tricks, or anything else fancy; it just gave me a firm, solid understanding of how to use Ajax, and that's exactly what I needed.
Indirect learning - doesnt work for me
The book spends about 20 pages introducing you to their genius learning methodologies that keep you interested and involved. That would be great if I was reading this book to kill time and had to be kept interested with pictures and games. In reality, I want to learn the material as quickly and directly as possible. If you are like this, skimming the book is about all you can do. I skimmed it in about 20 minutes (I have previous Ajax knowledge) and it was an OK Intro refresher. If you are serious about learning this and have an attention span greater than a 6 year old, you do NOT want to get this book. It's like playing Where's Waldo for relevant information among the spam of dialog boxes and arrows zig-zagging across the screen.
With that said, if you are learning Ajax grudgingly and don't care how much time you spend, this book will be great.
Worth the time and money.
I have never read any of the "head rush" series before... If they are all like this one, I will read many more.
This book explains the core of Ajax in the first chapter and that is what sold me (I read it in the book store over some coffee).
This covered very clearly what I have been looking for on the subject. Those items were:
1) What is the purpose of Ajax? Why would you use it? How does it help? (Looks great for more than GUI/UI, it also reduces bandwidth.)
2) What is the overview of Ajax? What is the application design workflow?
(The request, response, process, and update model is very simple and easy to understand.)
3) How involved is it? IE: will I need to learn tons of new concepts to use it effectively? (I turns out to be pretty trivial in concept if you understand web programming basics.)
4) What are the "catches" with browser compatibility? (Turns out these are more easily compensated for than I originally imagined.)
I could really go on and on about the questions that I had that were answered but the point is clear so I won't write a book on this book...
=)
Buy it if you're new to Ajax but familiar with Web technologies (PHP, JavaScrip, HTML, XHTML, CSS, DOM).
If you're not ... ah... this could be really confusing or a VERY solid start to learning.
The PHP examples are simple PHP so you won't have any PHP epiphanies reading this.
This book is worth your time (and money) if you don't already understand the Ajax paradigm.
It was perfect for me.
Head Rush Ajax (Head First)
Very nice book. I am enjoying reading it. It brings new view to asynchronous web javascript using non formal approach. I like Head First series.
Not my style
For me, all the information in this 400 page book could have been effectively presented in about 50 pages, using a normal page layout with illustrations. While reading this book, I felt like I was wasting my time. Eventually, I found myself skimming the pages for nuggets of useful information buried in all the fluff (handwritten notes, arrows, and pictures of dogs and guys in ribbed sweaters.) I am willing to consider that perhaps the style of this book is just not right for me. But even for someone who likes/is compatible with this style, I believe the limited amount of actual information contained in this book makes it not a good value.
(56 reviews)
