- Covers all aspects of Ajax including both client and server side and popular frameworks
- Mainly concerned with IE6 and earlier rather than considering IE7 and 8.
- Author doesn't understand the difference between HTML and XHTML
- Includes workarounds for many obsolete and long dead browsers
- Outdated coding with HTML and JavaScript all jumbled together
- Suggests fixing an IE problem by creating an Opera one in its place
- First Edition January 2008
- 957 page paperback
- Published by O'Reilly
- ISBN 0-596-52838-8
- Interactive Applications for the web
- Author Anthony T Holdener III
In reading this book I started to wonder whether it was written in 2008 or in 2002. Certainly the earlier date seems more plausible given that the author seems to spend a lot of time concerned with browsers which were popular back then but which were soon after declared officially dead and buried. A lot of the coding techniques for the client side processing also dates to about the same era and wouldn't be used in a more modern web design.
A number of the recommendations in the book are also misleading. XHTML 1.1 and XHTML 2.0 are not suitable for creating web pages as there is no browser that supports them and yet the author recommends them as the way to code the content. Even the use for XHTML 1.0 is limited as IE8 doesn't support it served as XHTML and you need to serve it as HTML for it to work. The author though suggests using one of these versions of XHTML though even though none of the JavaScript presented in the book will work with XHTML.
While this book covers many different aspects of Ajax rather thoroughly, the suggestions made in many instances demonstrate a lack of knowledge on the part of the author.
