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| ASP.NET AJAX in Action | 
 enlarge | Authors: Alessandro Gallo, David Barkol, Rama Vavilala
Creators: Scott Guthrie, Bertrand Le Roy
Publisher: Manning Publications
Category: Book
List Price: $44.99
Buy New: $24.58
You Save: $20.41 (45%)
New (29) Used (9) from $23.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 12432
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 600
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 7.4 x 1
ISBN: 1933988142
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9781933988146
ASIN: 1933988142
Publication Date: August 24, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: All orders ship same business day via standard shipping (USPS Media Mail) if received by 1 PM CST.
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Product Description
Ajax has revolutionized the way users interact with web pages today. Gone are frustrating page refreshes, lost scroll positions and intermittent interaction with a web site. Instead, we have a new generation of fast, rich, and more intuitive web applications. The ASP.NET AJAX framework puts the power of Ajax into the hands of web developers. ASP.NET AJAX, formerly called Atlas, is a new free framework from Microsoft designed to easily add Ajax features to ASP.NET applications. With this technology, ASP.NET developers can easily build more interactive and highly-personalized web applications that work across all most popular browsers. ASP.NET AJAX in Action is a fast-paced, example-rich tutorial designed for ASP.NET web developers and written by ASP.NET AJAX experts Alessandro "Garbin" Gallo, David Barkol, and Rama Krishna Vavilala. This book introduces you to Ajax applications and to the ASP.NET AJAX technology. Beginners will appreciate the clear explanations of key ideas and terminology. Intermediate and advanced ASP.NET developers will find a no-nonsense learning source and well-organized reference. ASP.NET AJAX in Action offers a rich set of examples and meticulous explanations. The extensive code samples are accompanied by accurate and rigorous explanations of the concepts behind development with ASP.NET AJAX. In this book, you will discover how to use
Microsoft Ajax Library Partial rendering with UpdatePanels Advanced client and server techniques Ajax Control Toolkit If you are a web developer looking to bring your web pages to life and to enhance the user experience, this book is for you. ASP.NET AJAX in Action will give you with the knowledge and tools you need to more easily craft the next generation of Ajax applications. With the help of the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX framework, Ajax development has never been easier and more instinctive for both client-script developers and ASP.NET developers alike.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 Clearly the best ASP.NET AJAX Book - buy it NOW! August 28, 2007
16 out of 21 found this review helpful
I do a lot of reading, and to the best of my knowledge my personal .NET book collection is bigger than anyone else's. The first thing I noticed about this book is the smooth and highly readable writing style - very rare to see in a technical book. As I read through the chapters it became clear to me that the content was no less stunning than the readability! The charts and tables are not merely a reprint of MSDN, and the authors dominated the subject without making it dry like a reference manual.
It was obviously their goal to ensure that readers already familiar with ASP.NET in general would become a subject expert on AJAX just by studying this book. The real world example code stands alone among the other books: this code works and it is highly relevant instead of being a bunch of contrived example snippets! There is no better book on ASP.NET AJAX.
I am looking for any other books from these authors - I'll order them without even thinking about it. There's a very short list of authors about whom I can make that statement. And I'll keep my eye on the Manning publishing company from now on. They know how to edit books well, and they selected the best authors available.
 Average Book, Embarrassing Framework April 20, 2008
12 out of 20 found this review helpful
Update: it's been announced that jQuery will ship with ASP.NET AJAX and Visual Studio - this book and review is now outdated.
Original Review: Take this book and the ASP.NET AJAX Framework with two grains of salt, if you're serious about AJAX then learn JavaScript and look into the alternative AJAX Libraries like: jQuery, Scriptaculous, Dojo, Mootools, and YUI.
This book lacks objectivity and often suffers from hype. The authors came across as lacking proficient experience with the JavaScript language, or exposure to other AJAX Frameworks / Libraries, or sufficient experience using the ASP.NET AJAX Framework in real world situations.
Comments like: "we recommend that...", "because it makes no sense...", "you must understand X,Y,Z to run complex client-side code without writing a single line of JavaScript" were discouraging, and always left me hanging. Good books answer more than the "hows" - comments like "you must rely on a special..." are a cry for more research.
The book skims over the bigger picture of why the ASP.NET AJAX framework is implemented, or where its going. Instead it presented many examples of "how-to" implement the various ASP.NET AJAX constructs and patterns. It would have been nice to see some real world examples of why the ASP.NET AJAX client-side typing system is useful, or why the AJAX Framework's extended JavaScript objects are useful and how these contrast to what JavaScript already provides, or what happens behind the scenes when a class is registered through client-side code, or why the AJAX Framework prefers declarative syntax (XML) over imperative syntax, and to have some real in-depth discussions on performance implications.
In addition to these disappointments, the ASP.NET AJAX Framework itself has serious technical flaws, it's too heavy weighted (bloated) for practical use - aside from demos you won't see this framework used in the real world. It's a short lived framework, many of the other AJAX Libraries already offer superior performance and better user experience I was disappointed with the server-centric approach the ASP.NET AJAX Framework and this book take, and was disappointed to have JavaScript continually swept under the carpet as magic.
A highly recommended book on a surprisingly useful library October 1, 2007
11 out of 15 found this review helpful
I had written off ASP.NET AJAX as bloated and for beginners until I bought this excellent book. While I have done AJAX by hand in the past, I'm now a convert to the advantages of leveraging this powerful library. I highly recommend this book both for beginners who want to start with ASP.NET AJAX and those professionals looking to either leverage this library, or to be convinced that they need to.
The book is full of practical examples that I was able to apply immediately to my code, as well as thorough explanations that enabled me to expand on and understand the code provided
Solid foundation + great examples September 4, 2007
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
I don't normally give a rave review about books unless I was really satisfied with the book, but this book really is a great book.
First of all, apart from it being an ASP.NET AJAX book, one of things I consider when buying a book is the overall flow of the book - the flows between paragraphs and the flows between chapters. On that note, ASP.NET Ajax in Action has a great flow. Especially the transitions of the book and the divisions of the chapters were well put into the book, so it could feel like reading a novel in some cases.
On the technical side, I like technical books that have a lot of examples that make good sense. This book is full of examples, which is very imporant for understanding a new technology. Another thing I like about th book is the detailed examplanations of the ASP.NET Ajax foundations. For example, it doesn't talk about UpdatePanel until Chatper 6 and 7, which most of ASP.NET developers like to just use for quick development. However, this book does a good job of illustrating the overall architecure of the Ajax framework, and does not neglect that Javascript is also a big part in developing Ajax-enabled websites. Unlike other ASP.NET Ajax books, this book has a few chapters dedicated to client-centric ASP.NET Ajax development, which is necessary for building hard-core ajax sites and components.
To conclude, this book is a must-have for asp.net developers and you can use it as both a reference book and a learning material.
A clear guide to an often unclear subject October 14, 2007
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
ASP.NET brought its own structure to the task of web development, formalizing some common practices and building a classical Visual/RAD development environment upon them. ASP.NET AJAX brings this into the realm of asynchronous communication, partial page updates, and client scripting. It's hardly the be-all, end-all of client-side development - but for the task of adding a faster, smoother, AJAX-style experience to an existing, postback-heavy ASP.NET site, it is well-developed set of tools.
This is not an AJAX book. It's a book on a framework, one which builds on another framework, and which uses AJAX techniques as a means to its ends. Frameworks change the game: as the name suggests, they're designed and used for the purpose of providing structure, but not necessarily easy access to a specific technology or techique. You will read this book to learn what that structure is, how to use it, and how to work around its limitations.
And you will learn it. This book is ruthless - everything an ASP.NET developer might need to know to move up to AJAX.NET gets pulled in, from a thorough Javascript chapter to basic authentication and cross-site-scripting security to the improvements coming in the forthcoming Orcas release, to common patters for use. I fully expected it to fall into the "tutorial-wrapped reference manual" trap that so many of these books do, but it never does. Nor does it spend too much time on any one topic. We get an introduction, discussion, example, further resources... and on to the next one.
The writing style is formal but not stiff, and relatively free of the sorts of scatter-shot proofing that seem all too common with first-edition technical books. Diagrams and code samples are clear, attractive, and plentiful.
I would recommend this book to anyone thinking about adopting ASP.NET AJAX for their site(s), and especially for anyone coming into a project already using it - I honestly cannot recommend a better resource for getting up to speed on the ins and outs of the framework quickly.
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