Gojko Adzic

Pragmatic Ajax: A Web 2.0 Primer, by Justin Gehtland, Bel Galbraith and Dion Almaer is a great introduction into the world of Web 2.0. In about 300 pages, this book covers most of the topics required to get started with Ajax-based development, from principles to debugging and integration with major server platforms.

True to it’s title, this book throws readers straight into the code, without boring theoretical details. After a very quick tour of asynchronous communication and basic principles of Ajax, I enjoyed the deconstruction of Google maps, which is probably the best known Ajax-based application. The book covers basic plumbing with XMLHttpRequest, but also gives a good overview of libraries which hide most of the complexity, including Dojo, Prototype and Scriptaculous. On the server side, PHP, Rails, Atlas (.NET) and DWR (Java) are covered briefly, along with the JSON communication protocol. Chapter on debugging Ajax applications is especially useful, since it contains a good overview of Firefox and IE plugins for DOM inspection, Javascript debugging and logging.

In conclusion, Pragmatic Ajax is an interesting book if you want a quick overview of current tools and technologies for Ajax-based web development. It is not for beginners, as it requires a solid understanding of HTML and JavaScript. I would recommend it to architects and web developers looking for a quick update on where the market is going, though even Ajax-infected programmers will find the review of tools and platforms very useful.

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