In the next generation of Web development, developers should be ready to build more interactive Web applications. Using the Ajax technique, they may successfully meet this challenge. For instance, everyone has been astonished with the high interactivity, speed, and usability that Ajax provides in Google’s map site. Specifically, Ajax makes Web pages more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server in the background, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change.

This book presents a complete set of topics about the Ajax technology and shows how to integrate Ajax with Microsoft’s popular .NET 2.0 Framework in order to produce successful interactive Web applications. This information is presented in 20 chapters, categorized into five different parts.

Part 1 provides newcomers with a genuinely accurate and helpful introduction to what the Ajax technology constitutes. The first chapter discusses the history of Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (DHTML) and Ajax. The second chapter introduces JavaScript. The third chapter presents, in detail, the XmlHttpRequest object. Chapter 4 discusses the role of Ajax in an n-tiered environment.

Part 2, which consists of three chapters, deals with Ajax components. Chapter 5 explores what defines a rich Internet application and how Ajax can fit into dynamic Web content as a whole. Chapter 6 studies cascading style sheets (CSS), for describing a page’s visual styling, and the document object model (DOM), for specifying a page’s composition. Chapter 7 presents the Ajax framework, providing a quick glance at some popular products on the market.

Part 3 deals with the code techniques behind Ajax programming. Chapter 8 discusses an Ajax library that is available to .NET developers. Chapter 9 describes how Ajax can be used with .NET Web services. The next chapter deals with tagging. A sample application (like the one on Flickr) is presented where users enter their tags and the Ajax code asynchronously delivers and updates the users’ text. In chapter 11, a clone example of the well-known Google Suggest application is presented. Chapter 12 explores a wide range of caveats in order to implement user controls. Chapter 13 describes how to build an Ajax-enabled application on the Web that supports dynamic mapping. Chapter 14 introduces .NET 2.0 Web Parts, which is a valuable tool for up-and-coming Web sites.

Part 4 deals with the security, performance, and debugging of Ajax applications. Chapter 15 explores whether Ajax is a secure method. Chapter 16 discusses the performance benefits that can be reaped by the Ajax technology. The next chapter discusses debugging and how it can be applied in Ajax. Furthermore, Ajax debugging options and some debugging tools for the browser are also presented. Chapter 18 discusses how to test an Ajax-based application. Chapter 19 presents the best practices as they relate to the world of Ajax development.

The last part of the book, which consists of a single chapter, provides a detailed look at Microsoft Atlas.

This book is well written and complete, since every important aspect of Ajax is covered and presented in an original and practical way. Although there are many books on the market that deal with Ajax, this book provides new ideas and perspectives for Web developers. I found the overview of JavaScript, CSS, and DOM, as well as the discussion about Ajax usability, to be very interesting. Another element that I really appreciated in this book was the identification of some free tools that are very useful in developing Ajax-enabled applications. It is also worth mentioning that the code samples throughout the book, which can be downloaded from the book’s Web site, are working samples. Overall, this is an interesting, easy-to-follow, and informative book that is well worth reading for .NET developers who are interested in building Ajax-enabled Web applications.