Forgot your password?
New user?
Document Actions
Head Rush Ajax
reviewed by Eric Walstad, November 2006
 |
| Head Rush Ajax is a great beginning course that covers a few fundamental JavaScript programming concepts. A beginning web developer will benefit from its slow, repetitivestyle that mixes graphics, conversational text, handwritten notes and homework-like exercises. Developers experienced with JavaScript or looking for a JavaScript or Document Object Model (DOM) reference book should consider a different book. |
To get the most out of the book the reader must follow its
instructions, do the exercises and commit to learning the material in
the way Head Rush Ajax teaches it. It took me a while to get used to
the teaching style as it felt painfully slow and discontinuous at
first. I played along, though, warming to it a bit, but ultimately
feeling like I'd be better served by a less chaotic writing style,
something more in the 'reference' side of the spectrum. |
|
What I liked most was getting to play with JavaScript. I'm a
server-side developer, mostly, so I enjoyed the book's coverage of
client-side code: using JavaScript to make asynchronous requests,
manipulate the look of the page with the DOM and work with the server's
response data (XML or JASON). I was a little surprised to find that
the term AJAX refers to a small subset of what client side developers
have been doing with JavaScript for a long time. |
| Head Rush Ajax has whetted my appetite for more fun with JavaScript. It was a bit slow for my taste; I'd like a JavaScript reference rather than a book with classroom-like exercises. The format will probably work well for some, though. The authors work hard to anticipate reader questions and use a variety of methods to help commit the answers to memory. Head Rush Ajax is a good fit for beginning programmers. It's a light intro to JavaScript, the DOM and server response data in XML and JASON format. |
| |