I have trouble with this book from chapter 1 because I have never thoroughly introduced myself to OOP. Objects are things on my desk or in the front yard or in the kitchen.

Over the years, I have taught myself lotsa languages including pre-OOP Perl.

Problem is: I don't get what thumbs is on page 18 -- is it an array? And I never feel as if I know what's really going on from that point forward.

-- Friendly David

I could not put this book down. I have a decent amount of experience with JavaScript and the DOM, etc., but I always thought of AJAX as something alien that would be difficult to understand. It turns out that this is just a different way of using what I already know. The book is very well organized and helps to make the concepts very understandable.

This was a well organized book to learn from. It presented the ideas in easily understood format with good examples and excercises. The book did a great job of explaining the concepts of .Net and OOPs in general so you can really understand what you are doing and wwhy. It didn't spend half time time (like most do) telling you it's like this in C or it's like this in Java. I would recommend this to anybody wanting to learn C#.

In a few minutes, Head First Ajax let you understand the basics of this technology without any trouble. It is a must have for anyone involved on the web development and programming

This book is for people who already know HTML very well and are familiar - but not necessarily experts - with CSS and Javascript. If you are not in that category you should probably check out "Head First HTML and CSS" first. This is not a reference book, but a book for understanding and, more importantly remembering Ajax via an unusual presentation style. That unusual presentation style includes fake interviews, lots of illustrations, and question and answer sessions. You are also presented several designs and shown the right and wrong ways to approach problems. Ajax requires a non-traditional approach to web application design, and head first books are always good at adjusting your thought process as painlessly as possible.

The topics covered include designing Ajax applications, Javascript events, multiple event handlers, asynchronous applications, the document object model and its manipulation, frameworks and toolkits, XML requests and responses, Javascript Standard Object Notation, forms and validations, post requests, leftovers, and utility functions.

I liked this book not only for its casual and fun presentation style, but because it starts explaining Ajax at the beginning and does not get confusing as you go forward. The author knows how to ramp up the difficulty level without you really noticing. Plus, you don't feel like you need half a dozen other books to understand what's going on. The author is clear in her explanation of what the book's limitations are.

Excellent product. Head First is a different type of technical writing. If you are looking for books with a lot of code examples this is not the one. But if you are looking for a book that will help you learn the actually concept, how AJAX works, then this is the one. I own multiple titles. They helped me learn C# when I was having trouble. Excellent in teaching. There are code examples such not a ton like other publishers.