Product Review
Ajax breathes new life into web applications by transparently communicating and manipulating data in conjunction with a server-based technology. Of all the server-based technologies capable of working in conjunction with Ajax, perhaps none are more suitable than PHP, the world’s most popular scripting language.
Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional is the first book to introduce how these two popular technologies can work together to create next-generation applications. Author
Lee Babin covers what you commonly encounter in daily web application development tasks, and shows you how to build PHP/Ajax-enabled solutions for forms validation, file upload monitoring, database-driven information display and manipulation, web services, Google Maps integration, and more.
You’ll also be introduced to other key topics like conquering cross-platform issues, countering potential security holes, and testing and debugging JavaScript with efficiency. All examples are based on real-world scenarios, so you’ll be able to apply what you learn to your own development situations.
Table of Contents
- Introducing Ajax
- Ajax Basics
- PHP and Ajax
- Database-Driven Ajax
- Forms
- Images
- A Real-World Ajax Application
- Ergonomic Display
- Web Services
- Spatially Enabled Web Applications
- Cross-Browser Issues
- Security
- Testing and Debugging
- The DOM
Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(14 customer reviews) 18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
A Good Introduction to AJAX for the PHP Programmer,
November 8, 2006 Jeffrey Heaton "Jeff Heaton" (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional (Paperback)
PHP is a very popular web scripting language. AJAX is the hottest new interactive web technology. It only makes sense to write a book to combine the two.
This book does a great job of combining clear explanation of the concepts with real working code that you can reuse in your own applications. Giving me a head start with reusable code is something I always look for in a book, and this book provides a wide range of PHP and Javascript code that you can reuse.
Chapter 1 begins with a very good description of what exactly AJAX is, and how it differs from traditional web programming. Chapter 2 builds on Chapter 1 by explaining the basic components of AJAX. The XMLHttpRequest object is covered in great detail. Each property and method is explained. The book only explains how to use XMLHttpRequest to communicate to the server and does not cover hidden iframe's. However, that may be for the best, since I believe hidden iframes are mostly a legacy way to implement...Read more
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Decent introduction to Ajax, but flawed execution,
February 22, 2007 S. Rider (Chicago area) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional (Paperback)
This book is pretty polished and gives a lot of information, but I found it flawed in a few rather bothersome ways....
First off, the author glosses over a lot of things that are generally considered "best practices" when it comes to using HTML -- for example, web page examples are often cluttered with "style" attributes applied to multiple tags, when this sort of thing should really be dealt with using a stylesheet (reducing the amount of typing and *greatly* increasing the readability of the examples!) If there is a particular reason why he doesn't do this, he should tell us, and he doesn't.
Second is the frequent use of innerHTML, which is nonstandard JavaScript -- I would be far more confident that he's truly teaching me the best way to use Ajax if he were more clearly demonstrating knowledge of best practices for HTML and CSS.
The other thing that made this book cumbersome in places was that in giving an example script, he'll dump four or more...Read more
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Error filled piece of @#$@#,
June 17, 2007 Boddicea "code tinker" (Indianapolis, IN United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional (Paperback)
Were the editors asleep when they put this out? A couple other people commented on the errors, but still gave it a 3 star rating. They were being kind. You can't learn anything when the examples are so completely riddled with errors. Others commented on the use of the deprecated innerHTML. For $35 I expect better from an author and his publisher. This one is being returned.
