The book starts off with some examples and quickly moves through XML and JSON to get you up to speed. Chapter 5 covers object orientated Javascript. The speed is good, if you know a bit of Javascript and have a familiarity with object orientated languages, this is quite straightforward. If not, it’s a good introduction to Javascript’s OO features.

Chapter 8 gets into debugging scripts with the web browser. It shows the tools available for Internet Explorer, Safari and an extended look at the Firebug extension for Mozilla Firefox. Oddly, for Firefox, there is no mention of the Venkman Javascript debugger, but it looks like Firebug does a great job regardless and has some features, such as viewing traffic between the browser and server that are specifically useful for Ajax programming.

The book then goes into creating some more parts. By chapter 10 the book is getting into building some reusable components like an accordion (fold parts of the page away), tree view, client-side validation and a data grid. Particularly interesting was how to build a validation object and a form (Chapter 12). The form performs a simple function – alert the user signing up for an account that the user name they chose is already in use.


The next set of chapters look at common design pattern and how they can be applied to Ajax applications. These include: singleton, Model View Controller (MVC), Observer and Data Reflection. For each pattern they cover what is is and then how to create and use in the context of an application- in this case an e-mail application along the lines of gMail. The chapters on patterns then wrap up with Interaction Patterns ( building a history object and drag and drop example) followed by Usability Patterns.

The server-side of the book (mostly chapters 20-22) focuses on MySQL and PHP, though it does touch on ASP.NET and ColdFusion in one chapter, specifically how Microsoft’s Asp.NET can simply Ajax applications on that platform. Most of the server examples though, given in the throughout the book are written in PHP.

The last two chapters look at security (and explaining how to to build a cookie-based authentication system) and a final chapter on best practises that wraps up the book.