ajax book?

[soni2926]

hi,
does anyone know of any good books on ajax and asp.net, one that
teaches ajax itself before jumping in atlas? I wanted to get an
understanding of ajax and how to use it, most books i've seen on .net
and ajax seem to jump into atlas right away, does anyone know of any
that teach ajax itself and then later get into atlas?

 

[Nathan Sokalski]

No, But I do know of an extremely wonderful book that teaches you how to
write AJAX in ASP.NET using just client callbacks (in otherwords, it tells
you how to write the code without involving Atlas), which is what it sounds
like you are having trouble finding. This book is the following (I have
included a link to it as well):

ASP.NET 2.0 Unleashed
by Stephen Walther

http://www.superexpert.com/Books/AspNet2Unleashed/Default.aspx

This book not only teaches you how to write AJAX applications, but many
other things as well. It has taught me more about ASP.NET 2.0 than all the
other ASP.NET books I own combined (and I do have quite a few), probably
because it is example based. It gives complete examples for everything it
teaches (not just little snippets, but the entire file, so you do not need
to worry about getting frustrated by not knowing you need to include certain
things). All code used in the book is included on a CD in both VB.NET and
C#, so you can view it in whichever language you want (the actual printed
text in the book only shows the VB.NET version, but the C# equivelant for
all the code is included on the CD). He does a great job of explaining the
details as well as the basics, so it is a great book regardless of your
previous knowledge. This is the most valuable book I have ever owned, and I
am sure you will feel the same once you read it. Good Luck!

 

[mark4asp]

hi,
does anyone know of any good books on ajax and asp.net, one that
teaches ajax itself before jumping in atlas? I wanted to get an
understanding of ajax and how to use it, most books i've seen on .net
and ajax seem to jump into atlas right away, does anyone know of any
that teach ajax itself and then later get into atlas?

Professional AJAX, 2e, by Zakas, McPeak, Fawcett, ISBN: 9780470109496
teaches AJAX without much reference to Microsoft - although they provide
dot.net code for all their examples; including their PHP examples, etc.
I recommend it. The main problem I had with it was a lack of focus - no
doubt due to them having to cover everything related to AJAX. In
particular I would've liked to have seen more on XSLT, XPath and XQuery
with AJAX (although I suppose that's another book or two).

ASP.NET AJAX in Action, by Gallo, Barkol, Vavilala, ISBN: 9871933988146
concentrates entirely on Microsoft AJAX, delving into the MS AJAX
framework. It's highly recommended to those of you who use MS AJAX
and/or the control toolkit and would like to use AJAX in more intuitive
and expansive way (or perhaps would like to write your own AJAX
controls?). I've not finished reading it yet but it's been excellent so
far. The chapter on javascript was top stuff.

On the subject of "needing to learn AJAX" - there isn't really much
there to learn. It's about knowing how to use the technologies (XHR,
Javascript, JSON, XSLT, XPath, XQuery, AJAX patterns) in combination.
None of this is hard. I'd say the hardest thing of all is the quirky
nature of javascript - then again as javascript is so fundamental
learning that keeps you in good stead for any and all future web
development.