Reviews for Professional ASP.NET 3.5 AJAX (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

1. Very disappointing regarding the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit

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

   I'm a professional software developer who's currently working with ASP.NET 3.5. When I bought this book I had already read chapters on AJAX in two other books, so I had a basic understanding of the main concepts and had tried out some examples. I bought this book by Evjen et al. mainly for expert information on one specific subject: The ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit. Given that this is the most visible part of the AJAX framework in ASP.NET this will apply to many developers.
   
   Chapters 7 and 10 deal with this material, and together they account for about 15% of the book. I restrict my review to these two chapters mainly because I have thoroughly worked through them, while I merely read most of the other chapters out of interest.
   
   Chapter 7 was very disappointing to me for a number of reasons.
   1. The text is almost identical in most parts to the text in the book `Professional ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and VB' by Evjen et al. There is virtually no additional information.
   2. The treatment is very shallow, because it rarely goes beyond the patchy information provided on the official ASP.NET/AJAX website at http://www.asp.net/AJAX/AjaxControlToolkit/Samples. This website, however, is far from a complete documentation of the AJAX Toolkit. Many vital parameters are not explained, and that's the information that I had hoped to find in a good book.
   3. Chapter 7 certainly doesn't offer the informaton that professional developers need. There is no discussion of potential pitfalls, problems, tricks, or anything of that sort regarding the toolkit. My very clear impression was that the author of this chapter has never seriously worked with the toolkit. When I experimented with the toolkit to make sure that my applications will be waterproof, I came across many critical issues, but found no information about them in this book. I found the information that I needed in many forums, however, and clearly this book does not address a lot of (very often rather obvious) points, that professional software developers need to address and discuss in forums on the Internet.
   
   Chapter 10 deals with animations which are an important subject in AJAX. However, most of the concerns noted above apply to this chapter too. It certainly does not offer a comprehensive, systematic introduction to the subject, instead it is rather a sketchy collection of a few examples with a bit of shallow text in between.
   
   It has to be said, however, that the other chapters in the book are not too bad. For example, chapter 3 deals with JavaScript in the ASP.NET context. This chapter is not much different from the treatment in other books, e.g., those by Matthew MacDonald. In general the book is written in clear and understandable English, and almost free of typos (in particular in listings).
   
   All in all my assessment is: If you are mainly interested in the AJAX Toolkit, this book is simply a very bad choice. If you are more interested in other subjects, it may be worth to have a look at it.