I had little knowledge on the subject of AJAX, but this book enlightened me. I could scope out the capabilities of this technology by reading a few key chapters. Now I understand the AJAX used in the enterprise level application I now maintain, plus a lot more. If you're a .NET programmer, I think you'll like the way this material is presented.

Very well-organized, easy to follow and provided a great starting point for the ASP.NET AJAX framework. Even if you've been surfing the ASP.NET AJAX documentation you'll still pickup some good tips and information from this book.

I have nearly completed my first tour through the book. It is well-organized, written with considerable clarity, possesses a reasonable number of focused examples, and covers ALL the bases in good depth, including deployment and custom controls. Some very minor deficiencies are a scattered few forward references and a muddling of the details of JSON serialization when accessing web services, but the errata and future printings will hopefully clear these up soon.

Thua I strongly recommend it as the FIRST book to introduce yourself seriously to mainstream AJAX 2.0.

Just got a copy of this new book on ASP.NET AJAX and it looks great. It should be because Matt is the Development Manager for ASP.NET so he deeply understands the product. He has also worked on several other books and I can personally attest to the fact that he can indeed form complete sentences. ;-)
Seriously, this book is straight from the source and contains good, detailed information about the ASP.NET AJAX release that applies equally well today and in Visual Studio 2008

Matt and Dan's ASP.NET AJAX book is an excellent one. It is packed with useful content, and contains a lot of great code examples that demonstrate real-world usage examples.

The book covers all of the core ASP.NET AJAX Scenarios:

- Server-Side Controls (UpdatePanel, UpdateProgress, etc)
- Client-side libraries
- Networking Stack
- Application Services
- AJAX Control Toolkit

Matt Gibbs is the development manager of ASP.NET at Microsoft, and led the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 development team - so obviously knows his stuff well. Dan Wahlin is a great trainer and presenter of ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX. You are in very good hands with them.

I highly recommend this book.