Review: Ajax in Action by Crane
This is the text of my amazon review, I gave it 4 stars.
I have to say, I’ve been extremely impressed with all the Manning books I’ve read. These books remind me of O’reilly books back in the day. Ajax in Action is no exception, although it was not what I was expecting. To be honest, I didn’t know what I was looking for in an Ajax book, but I looked through many of the latest crop of books and chose this one based on the reviews I’ve seen people give it and the strength of the imprint.
This book, and more books like it, are exactly the sort of books that are so hard to find for scripting languages, it isn’t primarily a book about language or syntax, but a book about programming. They spend the first half of the book discussing techniques, referencing heavily Model-View-Controller and the Gang of Four’s design patterns (which is also must read!). If they mentioned and showed their process of refactoring one more time in the book, I would have had to put it down to wipe away the tears of joy.
The second half of the book walks through several examples of application building. The examples are clear and useful. Their thought processes are well explained and even when you don’t agree with the way they are doing something, it is really beneficial to learn why they do things the way they did. And their process of starting broadly and then refining and refactoring each example is extremely helpful to see how one can actually put into practice these techniques in javascript.
This book is for someone who already has a decent familiarity with javascript as well as with basic AJAX principles. They cover, broadly, http requests, working with the DOM and CSS, and the event model. But they cover it more as a refresher as well as with an eye towards the best ways to implement them in your programming. They also talk throughout the book and extensively in the very interesting appendices, different toolkits and development tools that one can use with javascript.
There were some downsides, to this book however. I think because of the way they were structuring the book they often introduce a code snippet with some complex logic and hand wave around the complexity until several pages afterwards when they get to the section where it becomes the topic of discussion. If one isn’t immersed in javascript it can become a bit difficult to separate what should be obvious and what they will be talking about later.
They also spend a lot of time and space on the server side of things, giving examples in a several languages (although they give very short shrift to perl). I’m not sure that that is overly helpful, I think they should have assumed that you knew the server side language and simply referenced what the server side should be returning. The scope of the book simply didn’t allow them to go into depth with these languages and if you can program the language already the examples were uneccessary and if you don’t know the language it wasn’t enough for you to usefully do anything with them.
But those two problems are far outweighed by all the other goodness they’ve packed into this book. I highly recommend this book to anyone doing any javascript development.
