Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Bulletproof AJAX by Jeremy Keith

Here's the link to the review on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3DRUMZL4HNBF6/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Here's a link to the book's page on Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321472667/ref=cm_rdp_product


My book review for Bulletproof AJAX by Jeremy Keith


bought this book in order to get an easy and speedy up-to-date with the AJAX buzzword. This book does the job.

It is a short book (less than 200 pages). The writing style is very inviting and easy to read. I actually read it cover to cover easily in a very short time period.

The examples that walk you through are easy to understand and give the feel for the material.

Terms are very well explained. Jargon is explained too, which helps positioning yourself within the hype buzzword soup you read on the web.

The book explains nicely what AJAX is and what it isn't. It explores a few different ways of doing the same thing. It touches the important topics, giving a feel to them and understanding of "their trick". This is just enough to understand the material.

After reading the book I feed confident to be able to do ahead with my work: I have the basic understanding and the terminology so whenever I need something, I know if it is available, or even relevant or not and then can use an on-line resource or a reference book and complement the necessary knowledge to do the task.

I liked the fact that the author doesn't take for granted a specific browser. He explains how to do things in a way that will be compliant with all browsers. I liked the fact that the author promotes fallbacks, that is, alternative things to happen in case JacaScript is not supported, or that a certain operation is not supported. I liked that the examples and explanations are "backward compatibility motivated".

It is clear that the author is not possessed by the technology itself but thinks primarily about the user and the user experience, thus, compliance and backward compatibility are considered, but also feedback on progress and on changes made to the page and other accessibility issues.


I recommend the book as an introduction to the topic.