AJAX Hacks - pretty good book

There is a pretty good book available called AJAX Hacks. It is very up-to-date. It just came out in 2006 or maybe late 2005.

It has lots of examples of doing AJAX programming in JavaScript using HTML. It mentions some of the popular JavaScript DHTML libraries for doing extra fancy things that are commonplace in AJAX programs.

It also covers the AJAX integration features built into popular server-based web application programming frameworks. One well-known example is the Ruby on Rails framework for the Ruby programming language.

If you are going to write your own custom AJAX code in the browser then you should also learn JavaScript before you read this book. Or, at the very least, have a good JavaScript reference close at hand.

A really good one is JavaScript: The Definititive Reference (by Flanagan, published by O'Reilly). The 4th edition of it is kind of obsolete now, though - so be careful.

You want to get the 5th edition. The 5th edition will cover the particular JavaScript object used by all AJAX programs, the new features of the JavaScript language, and many other things.

The 5th edition is over 1000 pages.

Although, I do not think the JavaScript book today - I think it will be shipping by the beginning of September 2006. Amazon is accepting orders for it right now.

One thing that makes it especially attractive to order it from Amazon before it ships is that they knock about a third of the price. Check the price when you are shopping there and you will see what I mean.

If you plan on doing a ton of AJAX, DHTML, JavaScript, and DOM programming - you will probably want these books by your side. They are both extremely useful and very clear.