Elizabeth wrote:
I don't *expect* anything; I was looking for a "book" because it's a
commonly used unit of delivery; it doesn't have to be an "entire book" in
the sense of having some large number of pages .. I really don't care if
it's a short PDF file; but I would like something which covers enough ground
in a single text to be able to start doing some useful work with this
collection of technologies. I just don't want to have to refer to XML tomes
to see some simple ways of parsing the returned stream, for one
There are of course several AJAX books on the market; from experience I
know a lot of what the "computer press" puts out is garbage .. sold by the
pound ... so I asked in a forum where I expected people might know which, if
any, of the books might be worth buying. Needless to say, I also appreciate
any non-book references as well .. if they're good
Ajax in it's current state is nothing but uniformed build up over
IXMLHTTPRequest (IE) and XMLHttpRequest (FF etc.)
that's a little bit like saying all you need or want to learn "C" is the
ANSI specifications .. good luck, have fun
Do not get so defensive right a way. Ajax is an interface to get server
response without reloading or leaving the current page. Plain vanilla
all of it.
But after you got server data (would it be plain text, HTML, XML or
JSON objects) you naturally need to do something with it, otherwise why
would you try to get in the first place. So you will need to know how
to navigate through XML nodes, update page content, add rows to the
table etc. etc. This has nothing to do with Ajax, it's what was once
called DHTML. There are some good books about DHML, surprisingly (or
not) older they are - better they are.
If you know DHTML thus if you know how to change any given part of the
page in the wanted way, you don't care about Ajax anymore. It is just a
data delivery system. If you know what to do with data, you don't
really care how the data came to you. And if you don't know what do
with the data, then you don't really need it yet.
So if we are taking Ajax as it is, there is a very good article at
<http://www.jibbering.c om/2002/4/httprequest.htm l>
If we are taking Ajax in some superimposed meaning like "All kind of
cool things I can do in the modern Web" then I'm not ready to suggest
something right off my head. If you tell me what is your intended
future use of Ajax, I could possibly be more specific.
