AJAX, by Edmond Woychowsky

As I mentioned on January 10th, I’m going through a stack of AJAX books. The first of the bunch is AJAX: Creating Web Pages with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, by Edmond Woychowsky (Prentice-Hall, 2006, $44.99, ISBN 0-13-227267-9).

In general, this is a well-written book, with a lot of useful information to present. On the other hand, it’s written with an attitude: some will find it refreshing or amusing, and others will find it annoying. I started off in the former camp, and ended up in the latter.

Woychowsky starts by discussing Web pages and their taxonomy, introduces Ajax concepts, explains HTML, XHTML, and CSS, and offers a brief introduction to JavaScript. You can skip all that if you already know the material. Then he offers a chapter that discusses “Ajax Using HTML and JavaScript”, which is something quite primitive that wouldn’t normally be called Ajax; he does it from the ground up in 46 pages, and manages to throw in MySQL stored procedures. Don’t ask.

Then it’s off to a whirlwind tour of XML, and then on to 25 pages on XMLHttpRequest, which is a key component of Ajax as we know it. Then, finally, he’s ready to talk about traditional Ajax, using XML and XMLHttpRequest. After that, he wants to talks about Ajax using XSLT, because he’s a self-described XSLT geek, so he first has to wander off into XPath and XSLT-land; again, skip a couple of chapters if you already know that stuff. Near the end of the journey, we detour to Ruby on Rails, and finally get to its Ajax support; I’m not completely sure why Woychowsky bothered with that particular side trip.

Woychowsky’s book is part of Bruce Perens‘ Open Source Series, so maybe I should cut Woychowsky some slack about the gratuitous slurs against Microsoft in his book. On the other hand, some of them are inaccurate and misleading: for example, when he discusses ATLAS, which was the temporary codename for what is now called ASP.NET AJAX, he wanders off into a rant about “not invented here” syndrome, and then explains that he can’t run ATLAS because he doesn’t have $549 for Visual Studio 2005 Professional. Excuse me, Edmond: Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is free for the downloading, and works just fine with ASP.NET AJAX.

Woychowsky presents his own home-grown Ajax library in Chapter 12, “Better Living Through Code Reuse.” It’s not bad at all: you could do a lot worse. And you could easily modify it to your own devices and desires. (The sample code is here, but you’ll understand it better if you have the book.)

This is definitely not a book about using commercial Ajax libraries, or even free Ajax libraries, although Woychowsky likes the free Sarissa library and gives it 5 pages. On the other hand, the book is a good foundation for doing Ajax development yourself, and once you know how to do that you can intelligently examine the construction of the Ajax library your management wants you to evaluate, to see if it actually makes sense for your application.