I have an upcoming project that will require more use of Javascript or AJAX to
updates parts of web pages. Any suggestions for a moderate level book covering
AJAX? TIA
The book that I find useful and has frequently been referred to on
this group as the "least bad book on JavaScript" is in the faq. There
is plenty of errata to watch out for.
http://jibbering.com/faq/#FAQ3_1
The book "Bulletproof JavaScript" sounds great and i think it has some
good concepts (and some less than good ones) but the code isn't
bulletproof, unfortunately.
The problem is that none of the books I've seen talk about things like
memory leaks in Internet Explorer or feature testing that the Ajax
will work as expected in earlier browsers that had support for
XMLHttpRequest objects.
There are plenty of popular Ajax libraries out there but none of them
seem to be of sufficient quality to be recommended by members of this
group. Part of the problem is they libraries are bloated with features
you won't need yet your clients will need to download them. If I had
to choose I would choose YUI's ajax library. That is one of their
better modules, I think.
It isn't too hard to write your own Ajax library but it does take some
research. I wrote my own
http://forkjavascript.org/ajax/docs
http://dev.forkjavascript.org/trac/browser/trunk/public/javascripts/fork/ajax.js
But now regret I fell into the trap of having all features in one
file. Hopefully this will be remedied soon with a new project some of
the group members have been discussing.
http://cljs.michaux.ca/
Peter