review: Ajax Programming for the Absolute Beginner

Ajax Programming for the Absolute Beginner

This book is suitable for young people and I enjoyed reading it very much.

It is a whistlestopping tour of the interface design metaphors for highly interactive web applications. The territory, which includes the community nowadays for all these concepts that leverage mostly open source, is mapped out well as well as the tech.

It is a lot of fun and it is easy. Web application interface design is very near being the most superficial activity in the universe, which means it's a very broad topic. Mr. Ford pedals around the perimeter with agility.

Mr. Ford points out James Garret's seminal essay which begins, ''If anything about current interaction design can be called “glamorous,” it’s creating Web applications.'' Which is very witty in a two-edged fashion.

I used this book to learn Javascript, which I had been avoiding for over a decade. It also reinforced my suspicion that XML is vastly less suitable that JSON for most modern web applications, though that was hardly the author's intent.

Anyway, I needed a briefing and got one. Thanks, Jery Lee Ford!