Reviews for Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX: Written and tested with the final 1.0 release version of ASP.NET AJAX for ASP:NET 2.0 (Programmer to Programmer)

1. Too many authors

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, March 12th, 2008

   I'm normally pleased with Wrox publications but I found that this book has too many authors and the content does not flow. Material is repeated in separate chapters. It feels like they just compiled it quickly without thinking about the final result. I'm looking for something better now.

2. Everything about AJAX included - but where?

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2008

   After purchasing some dissapointing titles in the past, I now work to a golden rule, each title must have at least 5 reviews and an average of 4 or more stars rating. This has now served me well for some time.
   With AJAX being reletively new, this rule was hard to apply and I needed to know about AJAX very quickly to complete a project.
   So after studying the titles available for hours I decided on this title and another that had 1 review and 5 stars.
   
   After looking inside the books contents I decided that this was the one for me, particualy since I have other Wrox books and even paid for next day delivery. That's when the problem started!
   While the author's obviously have a vast knowledge of AJAX and the coverage in the book is complete, as a novice, the information just didn't come out of the pages for me!
   
   Whilst each chapter is laid out on each subject of AJAX, the contents seemed to be unclear and I found myself reading the same pages several times to try and understand them!
   Whilst there are examples on the use of AJAX (code behind pages are in C#, but the vb code can be downloaded from the Wrox website) and its controls, a real world example would have been nice.
   
   I gave the book 2 stars because the content is there and helped me find the missing answers on the internet, so maybe this book would be valuable to someone who can read a subject and take it in easily.
   
   Once I had ordered the book, I found it on the US site and the reviews there were poor, whilst my other choice had gained another 6 reviews of 4 stars or more and I have since seen this book which makes me feel even more let down!
   
   If you need to know AJAX, I believe you may do better elsewhere..