Book Review: Head Rush Ajax by Brett McLaughlin
Whoop, Yeah, Time to get funky!
I had not visited the O'Reilly land of "Head Rush" or "Head First" prior to this book. I have seen this series hyped and been told by people that "these books are great!"
And maybe the people saying that really believed it.
Over the years I have developed a reading style where I want to snuggle down with computing book, flip through the pages and suck out the information that proves useful to me as fast as I possibly can - preferably in a single sitting... and then repeat if necessary.
So when I read the learning strategies at the start of the Head Rush book:
- Slow down
- Read bits aloud
- Make it the last thing you read at night
Yeah, that doesn't sound like me.
OK, so call me a cranky, grouchy curmudgeon. And I have to use redundancy because the more we stress it the more we learn it.
For whatever reason I found this book slow going. The presentation doesn't support my study style. I found that too many of the illustrations obscured code - rather than enhanced it. I would have preferred a nice simple single page showing me the code example, rather than 10 cluttered pages.
I didn't find enough presented in this book to warrant 400 pages.
I guess if you know nothing about the topic, or if you have previously read a head rush book and ("luvved" it) then this will probably work for you.
And although I would not class myself as an expert, I have written some Ajax code and I have some JavaScript knowledge. But Ajax for Dummies and Ajax in 24 Hours worked better as learning tools for me than Head Rush.
I would prefer a smaller 100 page book as a more traditional introduction.
If your learning style supports the text then you will gain exposure to:
- Synchronous Calling
- Ready State Processing
- Asynchronous Calling
- Callbacks
- HTML Status Codes
- a bit of PHP
- DOM amendments
- a bit of XML parsing
- a bit about JSON
- a bit about SQL Injection
- and you can see more on the contents page
Chapter 1 excerpt available online (or as pdf).
I suspect that more visual topics such as Design Patterns will suit me better for this format so I haven't given up on the "Head" books - but I'll try Head First Design Patterns, instead of a programming language.
Related Reading:
