Rating:  - An Invaluable Resource!
An invaluable resource for serious web developers. After learning the concepts in ASP.NET AJAX In Action, AJAX technology will become part of your DNA. Working with Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX and the AJAX Control Toolkit, there's no need for third-party tools like NETAdvantage and r.a.d Controls.
Rating: - A clear guide to an often unclear subject
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.
Rating: - A highly recommended book on a surprisingly useful library
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
Rating: - Great Book
I just completed reading the book ASP.NET Ajax In Action and thought I would share my opinion of the book. While I have read various blogs and articles on AJAX, I am just now starting to implement it into our main enterprise level application, and wanted a book to really get me started in the right direction.
Overall I feel the content of the book is very good and the topics are delivered in an easy to read format. I really like the layout of the book, and feel the chapters were organized very nicely. I did not feel like the authors jumped around from topic to topic too much, and the flow of the book felt very natural.
Full detailed review:
http://devauthority.com/blogs/whoiskb/archive/2007/09/26/Book_Review_ASPNET_AJAX_In_Action_.aspx
Rating: - Solid foundation + great examples
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.
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