Head Rush Ajax (Head First) eBook Download

The style of the book, including pictures and diagrams, makes the technical material less dry than it normally would be in a text.


Newbies need the code that's in the book to work - this doesn't.
The teaching style is light and humorous and that's great and all (though definitely aimed heavily at 20-somethings), but when the code examples simply don't work, glib doesn't cut it any more.

This is the kind of book where you start doing the exercises and think "Oh, I can get this", then you end up banging your head on your desk because it seems so easy that you should be getting it, but nothing you do works.

In all fairness, the cute presentation does give a feel for the *conceptual* basis of the subject, but don't expect to come away from the book with anything concrete that you can set into a functional web project, unless the code has been re-written in a later edition or on the web.

Hopefully Head First's other Ajax book is a lot better to make amends for this lemon, or else I may have to give up on this series. Learning should be engaging, thought-provoking and fun, but folks, the code needs to work(!) or else it quickly stops being fun.


Notice the "rush" in the title...
Notice the rest of the books in this series are all "Head First ...", but this one is "Head Rush ...".

Reviewing this book in a vacuum I'd say its strength is its very thorough, very tutorial, very well-illustrated coverage of the lifecycle of an XMLHttpRequest.

And does anyone know how I'm supposed to choose amongst these titles in the same series: "Head Rush Ajax (Head First)", "Head First Ajax", "Head First Javascript"?

Other worthy choices:
- "The Book of Javascript", Thau
- "Ajax: The Definitive Guide", Holdener
- "Adding AJAX", Powers
- "Building a Web Site with Ajax: Visual QuickProject Guide", Ullman

Now, go build some Web 2.0 thingy that replaces the Desktop OS!


A fun read, but don't use it on the job...
The book is humourous and a pleasant read, and a fun way to learn Ajax in your easy chair by the fireplace.

I tried building a real-world application with this as my guide - as I went through each chapter, I'd use the methods conveyed by the examples to build my own project.

Meanwhile, I had wasted about half an hour wondering why the back-end application wasn't receiving any of the form contents, putting in javascript in the front-end to display what it was sending before it sent it, putting logging in the back end to dump the inputs to files for analysis.

My copy now has "WRONG" written in one-inch letters across page 299. But if there are also two black wires, you must not cut the red wire.")

Authors, I can appreciate your writing style and your general method of teaching - but please be aware that some programmers like to test our applications incrementally, and leaving a booby trap in the code just wastes our time.

Computer science students, get this computer ebook by download itHead Rush Ajax (Head First) from Rapidshare/Megaupload/Hotfile for free.