A great waste of time
I tried to read this book, but gave up after the first few chapters.
There MAY be actual useful and relevant information in later chapters, but judging by the amount of text devoted to opinionated rants and tiresome attempts at humor, and the otherwise belabored discussion of precursor or peripheral technologies, I decided that the book was too short to ALSO cover much useful information on the actual subject, and also that life is too short to spend it panning through these layers of distraction to maybe find a few useful points. At this point, I would have to view any points made with skepticism, having witnessed the author/editor's apparent poor judgment if not outright disrespect for the readers.
The book reads like a blog that thinks it's too big for just the web.
Awesome
This book was far more informative than I imagined it would be, and I very highly recommend this to anyone who wants to get into Ajax.
Also lots of good humor throughout the book.
Great!
Not a good fit for anyone
The book is an unfortunate failure, given the popularity and importance of the topic. It is filled with geeky humor, but far too much so, such that this fluff adds almost a third to the length of the book. There is plenty of code, but much of it is detached and not useful at all to someone trying to learn these concepts from scratch. The book is of little use to either the expert or the complete beginner. The expert will be puzzled by extremely repetitive explanations of the absolute basics of XML and Javascript, while the beginner will be bewildered by the fact that it contains such introductory passages even as they are overwhelmed by pages of PHP, C#, advanced XML, and countless short-cuts in the code which feel like unnecessary showing off when you are trying to teach users how to use AJAX.
Easy Reading, But Lacking
I found the book to be an easy read because the author wrote in a conversational, and often humorous manner. However, what I found disturbing and difficult to learn from was that, even though the author included a lot of code in the book, there were almost no screen shots of what should be expected of the code. It made understanding what was being explained difficult because there was no visual side to the code. Also, he talked about the ability to hide pages and using a method to unhide those pages for debugging purposes, but, again, should have included screen shots to demonstrate his techniques. Unfortunately, I will have to find another source to help me learn this topic.
Regretfully I'm going to have to agree...
with the reviewer that mentioned the fact that this book is filled with an unbelievable amount of nonsense. If you were to take the good parts of this primer and remove all the other tree pulp waste, it would be a 30-35 page book. The parts that are informative are so, but fall short in depth and sometimes the author just goes on another of his drivel rampages in media res and confuses the bjeezus out of the reader.
One of those computer books that makes you be glad there are lenient return policies for books.
(12 reviews)
