Ajax Bible

Preface

This book is all about making your Web applications look and feel like desktop applications, which is the whole idea behind Ajax. Web applications are becoming more and more popular these days, but there's still that problem with Submit buttons: when you click one, the whole page flickers and refreshes, and you have to wait until the page downloads.

That's exactly where Ajax comes in. With Ajax, you can communicate with the browser behind the scenes, get the data you need, and display it in a Web page. There's no page refresh, no waiting required, no flickering in the browser.

That's cool, because it means your Web applications start to look and feel like desktop applications. As your users' connections to the Internet get faster and faster, soon there will be just about no way to tell a Web application apart from a desktop application.

Ajax is the future of Web programming. With Ajax, applications in a Web browser can work just like those installed on the user's computer. It's no surprise that Ajax is the hottest Web programming topic in years.

About This Book

Everything Ajax is in this book. Part I starts with a guided tour of how Ajax is used today. Along the way you're going to see some very cool applications, as well as some games.

Ajax is based on JavaScript, and there's a section in this part on how to work with JavaScript. If you don't know JavaScript, you're going to need to pick it up, and you can do that here. If you do know JavaScript, you can skip this part ...