Head Rush Ajax (Head First)

I'm a fan of the Head First series. They make a welcome change to the staid text book style of the majority of computing books. However I think this particular offering is not one of their better efforts. Maybe Ajax isn't really that complex a topic and doesn't require a book of this length, or maybe the author spent too much time on the Head First fun filled packaging and not enough on the content. I actually found that the Head First fun and frivolity actually seemed to pad out the book and unnecessarily labour what is actually a fairly straightforward topic.
If you're familiar with javascript there's not much more to Ajax than learning how to use the XMLHttpRequest object and handle its return codes. The other side of the coin is the way the server processes the request and returns text or XML back to the browser and this is where I think the book is very weak. Given the length of the book I felt that there should have been more detailed coverage of the different options for back end processing.
In the end I got bored with the book and sold it on ebay. The other Head First books I have bought are outstanding. Head First Java (Head First), for example, does an excellent job of making difficult topics intelligible. The problem with this book is that all the dumbed down explanations make you feel that Ajax is a more complex topic than it really is.

what the heck is this? (3/3 people found this helpful)

This book is really really really bad, im a fairly experienced web developer and I have trouble following this book. You will find yourself reading it in the wrong order as there are little snippits of text everywhere in handwriting fonts. not only that but you will find yourself flipping back and forward to find the solution it hints at but does not give.

Go find a formal book that will explain the nitty gritty

Another cracker from the HF stable (6/6 people found this helpful)

You may, like me, be wondering what the 'Head Rush' appelation is all about compared to the 'Head First' series. This is a slimmer book than the 'Head First' series, coming in at 400 pages (compared to 700-800 for the HF series). Also, it's focussed on a smaller topic. Apart from that, though, it's exactly the same format as the HF books, with some old HF characters popping up. HF stalwarts may be surprised to find that Frowning Woman In Denim is absent from this book, though.

As a prerequisite, you need to know HTML and CSS. You should also know a bit of Javascript. Nothing too fancy, just enough syntax to follow variable definitions, loops, conditionals and subroutines. If you don't know JS at all, I think you'll have trouble keeping up. The server side code is all in PHP. I don't know PHP, but it was close enough to Perl that I had no difficulty following it.

You also probably don't want to know too much about Ajax already. In fact, if you've done a lot of Javascript before, you may find the chapter on DOM a bit slow going. You'll find the pace just right if you're someone who's taking their first step in scripting on the browser side.

Brett McLaughlin proves he can do the HF style in this book. No worries there at all. In the first chapter, you could perhaps argue that some of the diagrams are over-annotated and have just too many arrows in them. In previous HF books, it was normally obvious what the flow of the diagrams were. Not so here, in a few places. However, from chapter 2 onwards, things are fine. In fact, the whole thing is a delight, as usual.

HR Ajax covers the basics very well and entertainingly so: what makes Ajax different from standard HTML requests, asynchrony, manipulating the DOM, and using XML versus JSON. Plus it mentions some browser-specific gotchas (including Opera and Safari), and provides very brief introductions to JS libraries like Rico and Prototype. Hardcore JS GUI-masters, this is not the book for you. Newcomers to Ajax, start here. You'll be glad you did.

Very easy to follow (1/1 people found this helpful)

This was the first Head Rush book I've read and found it an interesting format. Head Rush books don't have the typical layout and feature hand drawn illustrations and notes you probably do yourself when studying. This Ajax introduction is very much for beginners with an emphasis on maintaining enthusiasm and memory recall while learning. If you are more experienced in programming JavaScript or any other language for that matter, you would be better suited to one of the "Professional Ajax" titles.

Slightly disappointed (12/12 people found this helpful)

I've read a couple of the Head First books and really loved them, but was a bit disappointed with this book.

It repeats itself slightly too much, and I found myself skipping sections because it was just going through yet again what I had just read.

I also knew about some stuff like the DOM already and it would have been good to have a 'if you know the following you can skip this chapter' section.

I don't want a reference book but it would be really useful to have the complete code for each of the projects described in one place somewhere. When I tried to write my app after reading the book, it didn't work and it took me ages to work out what exactly I'd missed out. Some pointers on common mistakes would also have been good.

It's still quite a good book, but I guess after the Head First books I'd come to expect more. I wish it had been slightly more ambitious and tried to cover a bit more.

Brett McLaughlin

Reader Reviews:

Very disappointing (0/0 people found this helpful)

what the heck is this? (3/3 people found this helpful)

Another cracker from the HF stable (6/6 people found this helpful)

Very easy to follow (1/1 people found this helpful)

Slightly disappointed (12/12 people found this helpful)

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