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Product Description Learn to build dynamic, interactive web applications using the two most important approaches to web development today: Ajax and the phenomenally efficient Ruby on Rails platform. This book teaches intermediate to advanced web developers how to use both Ajax and Rails to quickly build high-performance, scalable applications without being overwhelmed with thousands of lines of JavaScript code. More than just recipes, you also get a thorough, low-level understanding of what's happening under the hood. - Ajax on Rails includes three fully worked out Rails/Ajax applications, and quick reference sections for Prototype and script.aculo.us.
- Testing lessons show you how to eliminate cross-browser JavaScript errors and DOM debugging nightmares using a combination of Firebug, and Venkman.
- Advanced material explains the most current design practices for Ajax usability. You'll learn to avoid user experience mistakes with proven design patterns.
Beyond the how-to, Ajax on Rails helps you consider when Ajax is (and isn't) appropriate, and the trade-offs associated with it. For those new to Rails, this book provides a quick introduction, the big picture, a walk through the installation process, and some tips on getting started. If you've already started working with Rails and seek to deepen your skill set, you'll find dozens of examples drawn from real-world projects, exhaustive reference for every relevant feature, and expert advice on how to "Ajaxify" your applications.
Featured Customer Reviews Outdated Code Makes this book a pain to learn from.,
October 19, 2008 I'm working through this book as I work to transition from PHP development to Rails with Ajax. I'm starting a new project from scratch and wanted to take on this "newish" methodology that is supposed to make my development more fun and way faster.
Well I bought the book a year ago when I was thinking the same thing. But I didn't find the time to invest in a new language until now.
Unfortunately Rails 2.0 has been out for a while and this book is written to 1.2 or something. Prototype is also in version 2.x and the book was written to something like 1.5
And that doesn't even mention that there are much different ways to get Ruby and Rails installed now.
So far I've spent a few days just making Rails work at all on my XP computer. It turns out that there is now a package called InstantRails that you just unzip and run in place. So I wasted those days trying to track down the components described in this book to no avail.
Now that I'm working with the code, I'm finding that the examples simply don't work in about half the cases due to the deprecated functions and new naming conventions and so on. It's like learning how it was done two years ago along with how it is done now. And it's really slowing me down.
Every time something doesn't work, instead of learning the lesson intended by the book, I spend a lot more time learning how to troubleshoot the problem until I find the new correct way of doing the same thing.
So I can't say that I'm not learning from this book. I'm learning a lot. It just that I'm learning by correcting errors on my own instead of by clear examples that work. It's kind of painful and slow.
The book seems to be good other than that. My only complaint is that some of the terms used aren't clearly explained early on. But I think most programmers can get past those and just keep reading and be fine.
I just don't recommend buying this book anymore. If there's an updated version to cover the current versions of the applications, that might be worth getting. Succint intro, but not much more,
August 25, 2008Ajax on Rails,
April 11, 2008 It's a good book, the structure and ideas are clear and comprehensive maybe I miss to download the examples' code from internet but I quite a few happy with this purchase, I got my money's worth.Not bad at all,
November 16, 2007 I've bought this book with expectation. The title implied the feeling that this book would be THE book I'd ever need for AJAX on Rails. However it gave less than I've expected. There's a large portion of reference material you can easily find in the rails documentation. It was an easy read, I've completed in one day. In the end, I found Peepcode videos to be more informative than this book. very concise and useful,
October 19, 2007
This book assumes good level of familiarity with javascript and ruby on rails.
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