Head Rush AJAX

Using the irreverent style common of the Head Start/Head Rush series of books, this book starts at the beginning and introduces you to all you need to know to be able to write the Javascript that will both send requests to the server and update the page with the results when they are returned.

This book concentrates on the Javascript side of things and uses a few simple PHP scripts to demonstrate the server side of the processing without going into great detail on how to handle that side of things (after all PHP is only one of many possible languages that can be used for that part). There are also a couple of chapters that provide a good explanation of the Document Object Model which is extremely important when it comes to updating your page when the results of the query are returned.

One of the best things about this book (apart form the excellent explanations of how the code works) is that it also looks at security issues (although the info on security with JSON could have been mentioned earlier than Appendix 2.

Any one with a basic understanding of Javascript should be able to work their way through this book as all of the Javascript is explained at some point in the book and where the explanation is considered to be too advanced for that point in the book it is made clear that the code will be fully explained later in the book.

If you learn Ajax from this book you are unlikely to forget much of what you learn.

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