Actual book title that is reviewed here is Advanced Ajax: Architecture and Best Practices by Shawn M. Lauriat. However better title for this book would be advanced JavaScript, because – well let’s face it AJAX is just one class, so there wouldn’t be much to write about wouldn’t it?
By any means it is not a book for people who have no idea about object oriented programming in JavaScript. Especially you should know what are prototypes in JS, because Shawn uses them from the very beginning, more over he uses them in the first code listening in the book:
function Throbber() {} Throbber.prototype = { ... }
Once you learn what are and how prototypes in javascript work, reading “Advanced AJAX” is fun.
Ok, on to the review. Advanced AJAX book is intended for front end architects – if you will. In eleven chapters Shawn explains how to create advanced high quality web applications, offering along the way code samples and advices NOT available elsewhere.
I liked that, aside of application architecture, author covered such topics as: web development tools/plugins for all modern web browsers (IE, Safari, Opera and FireFox). The other interesting chapter was the one about optimization. Shawn describes optimization techniques for decreasing bandwidth, server CPU and memory usage, at the same time he gives tips that will dramatically improve page load time. Like you can expect in “advanced” book, all security topics (SQL injection, XSS, CSRF) were covered.
One thing that i liked most (and which deserves single paragraph) is that Shawn always uses JavaScript Event Model – which definitely is a good practice. A lot of (if not most of) developers still use “onclick”, “onfocus”, “on-whatever” attributes to execute action while this kind of approach is deprecated. Why this is important? it’s described in chapters on Usability and Accessibility.
What i didn’t like. Shawn covers some interesting server side topics (memory caching, debugging with XDebug), however only PHP developers will find this topics useful because all the code is written in PHP, i think it could be replaced with someting more general. The other thing i didn’t like is that some code listings are quite long – like 6 pages of code. I do not think it was good idea, i think that even JS pro would have problem with “compiling this code in his head”.
All in all, “Advanced Ajax: Architecture and Best Practices” is a good book. Pretty well written, if you are interested in nuts and bolts of client side and AJAX application architecture then this is the book you should buy. Buy it now from Amazon for ultra low price.
3 Comments on "Advanced AJAX best practices (book review)"
i have read it its really good book to understand ajax
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