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Ajax in Action [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)
by Dave Crane, Eric Pascarello, and Darren James
| Category:
Ajax, Programming, Language & tools, Computer science |
| Market price: ¥ 430.00
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¥ 378.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
To quote Val's Blog, "A tremendously useful field guide specifically written for developers down in the trenches... waiting for the killer solution... " |
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Author: Dave Crane, Eric Pascarello, and Darren James
Publisher: Manning Publications
Pub. in: October, 2005
ISBN: 1932394613
Pages: 680
Measurements: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.5 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01550
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1932394610
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- Awards & Credential -
One of the most widely acclaimed and bestselling books on Ajax. |
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- MSL Picks -
Ajax is a Web programming technique that lets you develop rich, dynamic, interactive interfaces using nothing but JavaScript, HTML and CSS on the desktop. It's changing the landscape of the Web, and this book will help you gear up to be part of the revolution. Renaissance men David Crane and Eric Pascarello show you how to weave together the many pieces that make up an Ajax application: JavaScript, server-side components, HTML, CSS, and XML. More importantly, they teach you the tools and techniques you'll need to develop industrial-strength applications using JavaScript, a language that doesn't always get as much respect as it deserves.
This is really two books in one: first, it's a look at the Ajax technologies and prescriptions for their effective use. There are detailed discussions of relevant design patterns and of strategies for designing usable and secure applications. There are substantial discussions of a number of Ajax frameworks, libraries, and development tools, as well as developer features of Web browsers that you've probably never learned about but can't live without.
The second half of the book is a cookbook, a compendium of detailed blueprints for concocting your own versions of a trifecta of Ajax showcases: dynamic double combo boxes, typeahead select boxes, and Web portals with selectable, draggable portlets. There are even recipes for assembling standalone Ajax applications that use existing third-party Web services as a back-end. I liked that the cookbook built on the earlier parts of the book by deliberately applying the design patterns and refactoring techniques therein described.
If you're serious about helping to revolutionize the Web, you need this book.
(From quoting Ernest Friedman-Hill, USA)
Target readers:
Web programming students and computer science majors.
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Dave Crane has pushed the boundaries of DHTML, and latterly Ajax, on digital TV set-top boxes, in home automation and banking and financial systems. He lives in Gloucestershire, UK.
Eric Pascarello is an ASP.NET developer and a moderator of the HTML and JavaScript forum at JavaRanch. He lives in Laurel, MD.
Darren James is the architect of the open source Rico project. He lives in Sunnyvale, CA.
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From Publisher
Web users are getting tired of the traditional web experience. They get frustrated losing their scroll position; they get annoyed waiting for refresh; they struggle to reorient themselves on every new page. And the list goes on. With asynchronous JavaScript and XML, known as "Ajax," you can give them a better experience. Once users have experienced an Ajax interface, they hate to go back. Ajax is new way of thinking that can result in a flowing and intuitive interaction with the user.
Ajax in Action helps you implement that thinking - it explains how to distribute the application between the client and the server (hint: use a "nested MVC" design) while retaining the integrity of the system. You will learn how to ensure your app is flexible and maintainable, and how good, structured design can help avoid problems like browser incompatibilities. Along the way it helps you unlearn many old coding habits. Above all, it opens your mind to the many advantages gained by placing much of the processing in the browser. If you are a web developer who has prior experience with web technologies, this book is for you.
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From the Author
Preface Sometimes your destiny will follow you around for years before you notice it. Amidst the medley of fascinating new technologies that I was playing - I mean working - with in the early 1990s was a stunted little scripting language called JavaScript. I soon realized that, despite its name, it didn’t really have anything to do with my beloved Java, but it persistently dogged my every step.
By the late 90s, I had decided to cut my hair and get a proper job, and found myself working with the early adopters of digital set-top box technology. The user interface for this substantial piece of software was written entirely in JavaScript and I found myself the technical lead of a small team of developers writing window-management code, schedulers, and all kinds of clever stuff in this language. "How curious," I thought. "It’ll never catch on."
With time I moved on to more demanding work, developing the enterprise messaging backbone and various user interface components for an "intelligent," talking "House of the Future." I was hired for my Java skills, but I was soon writing fancy JavaScript user interfaces again. It was astonishing to find that some people were now taking this scripting language seriously enough to write frameworks for it. I quickly picked up the early versions of Mike Foster’s x library (which you’ll find put into occasional action in this book). One afternoon, while working on an email and text message bulletin board, I had the weird, exciting idea of checking for new messages in a hidden frame and adding them to the user interface without refreshing the screen. After a few hours of frenzied hacking, I had it working, and I’d even figured out how to render the new messages in color to make them noticeable to the user. "What a laugh," I thought, and turned back to some serious code. Meantime, unbeknownst to me, Eric Costello, Erik Hatcher, Brent Ashley, and others were thinking along similar lines, and Microsoft was cooking up the XMLHttpRequest for its Outlook Web Access.
Destiny was sniffing at my heels. My next job landed me in a heavy-duty development role, building software for big Tier 1 banks. We use a mixture of Java and JavaScript and employ tricks with hidden frames and other things. My team currently looks after more than 1.5 million bytes of such code - that’s static JavaScript, in addition to code we generate from JSPs. No, I’m not counting any image resources in there either. We use it to develop applications for hundreds of operators managing millions of dollars’ worth of accounts. Your bank account may well be managed by this software.
Somewhere along the way, JavaScript had grown up without my quite realizing it. In February 2005, Jesse James Garrett provided the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle. He gave a short, snappy name to the cross-browser-asynchronous-rich-client-dynamic-HTML-client-server technology that had been sneaking up on us all for the last few years: Ajax.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Ajax is generating a lot of interest now, and a lot of good code is getting written by the people behind Prototype, Rico, Dojo, qooxdoo, Sarissa, and numerous other frameworks, too plentiful to count. Actually, we do try to count them, in appendix C. We think we’ve rounded up most of the suspects. And I’ve never had so much fun playing - I mean working - with computers.
We have not arrived yet. The field is still evolving. I was amazed to see just how much when I did the final edits in September on the first chapter that I wrote back in May! There’s still a lot of thinking to be done on this subject, and the next year or two will be exciting. I’ve been very lucky to have Eric and Darren on the book piece of the journey with me so far.
We hope you will join us - and enjoy the ride.
Dave Crane |
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Jeanne Boyarsky (MSL quote), USA
<2008-11-07 00:00>
"Ajax in Action" is not only an excellent book on Ajax, but the best JavaScript book I have ever read. The authors note early on that Ajax is a process, not a technology. This theme permeates the book. There is an emphasis on requirements, design, implementation, testing and maintenance. So the book shows how to do a real project, not just how to code.
Keeping with the real project theme, there is information throughout on refactoring and design patterns. The authors present low level coding idioms as well. All this creates a language for coding Ajax applications. The second half of the book walks you through the entire development process for five sample applications.
The book targets a wide audience range, from enterprise developers to self-taught scripters. Basic concepts are explained concisely for newcomers and experienced developers may skim certain sections. However these sections are a very small part of the 600+ page book.
An appendix covers an introduction to JavaScript. While you would want to supplement it with materials from the web, it clearly covers the advanced topics that are hard to find elsewhere. There are also introductions and tips on CSS and DOM. In short, I learned a ton about non-Ajax development and page manipulations too.
And the book even has a screenshot of JavaRanch! I was expecting a good book when I saw Bear and Ernest's comments on the back. But it still managed to exceed my expections! |
Felix Sheng (MSL quote), USA
<2008-11-07 00:00>
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. |
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