Reviews for Building a Web Site with Ajax: Visual QuickProject Guide (Visual QuickProject Guides)

1. Short and to the point

   Rated 3 out of 5 stars, November 12th, 2009

   This book takes you through a simple web site project with very limited discussion about general issues.
   
   You build a MySQL database of employees, their departments and their email addresses. You then get php scripts to browse, load and search the databases; each then elaborated to use Ajax. This demonstrates use of responseText inserted as innerHTML, responseXML inserted using DOM node creation, and JSON.
   
   It's useful in that it shows a practical implementation where the site functions whether or not the user has JavaScript enabled, although I feel worrying about non-Ajax users is getting a bit dated.
   
   The actual content is useful as a tutorial but I have some reservations about the concept. Use Amazon Look-inside and you will notice the typography is appalling, probably the worst I've ever seen. From another book I have, it does seem Peachpit are trying to push some boundaries but unfortunately they don't succeed in pushing them forwards, but rather backwards into the nursery. The book is 155 pages long but represents maybe 50 pages of adult layout. Even then there is quite a bit of repetition. So it really is very short. I know it's cheap but you may expect more than you would get from a typical Internet article. The other issue is it is as much php as JavaScript so make sure you have a superficial understanding of php.

2. Very useful intro

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2009

   At the price this is an excellent buy. It only takes a couple of days to complete and is an excellent intro to anyone who wants to build a database driven website. It's a lot less irritating than Head First Ajax as it gets to the point quicker and isn't crowded with irrelevant content.
   It uses a 3 stage "this is what you need to do", "let's do it", "now review it" approach which is really helpful.
   The two minor drawbacks are that it's written by a Mac user who knows little about Windows and it really doesn't say too much about the use of CSS.