Ajax Hacks - O'Reilly's Latest Release

For Immediate Release
For more information, a review copy, cover art, or an interview with
the author, contact:
Kathryn Barrett (707) 827-7094 or kathrynb@oreilly.com

Creative Approaches to Enhancing the Ajax Experience
O'Reilly Releases "Ajax Hacks"

Sebastopol, CA--What could be better than using Ajax to bring new
flexibility and responsiveness to your sites and applications? Why,
hacking Ajax, of course. To hear web developers and designers talk,
Ajax--a term used to describe the combination of a group of popular web
technologies--is the best thing to happen to web sites in years. But once
you've dabbled in Ajax and mastered the basics, you'll start looking for
new ways to apply it. "Ajax Hacks" (O'Reilly, US $29.99) by Bruce W. Perry
offers a wealth of tips and tools to keep Ajax aficionados coding for as
long as they like.

According to Perry, "Ajax Hacks" was written for people enjoy hacking web
applications creatively, as well as for both experienced and new
web-application developers. "Ajax seems to have reached a tipping point
where many software developers are examining this group of existing
technologies (JavaScript, XML, JSON, DOM, XMLHttpRequest) as a potential
model for future web applications," says Perry. "Because of the increasing
ubiquity of broadband Internet connections and connected mobile devices,
web applications continue to be used for tasks that may have previously
used a traditional desktop application. These new web applications will
increasingly use the Ajax model."

In a foreword to the book, Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path, known for
coining the term Ajax, observes that over the years web designers and
developers have developed an arsenal of conventions to rely on when
designing applications: where the logo goes, how a link behaves when it is
clicked, etc. But he observes that much of that knowledge goes out the
windows with Ajax. "We have a wider palette to work with," says Garrett,
"but that also means we have more opportunities to make mistakes. And
believe me, we'll make a lot of them. It takes time to get smart, and just
as it took us a while to get a handle on the old static Web, it'll take us
some time to get good at creating Ajax experiences as well."

Garrett adds, "That's where you--and this book--come in."

In "Ajax Hacks" readers will learn to:

-Enhance HTML forms with Ajax capabilities, customizing them to fit user
 expectations
-Explore the Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, and GeoURL APIs, and combine them
-Work with cookies in an Ajax environment
 Manage Browser History and the Back button
-Create Ajax applications using Direct Web Remoting for Java and Ruby on
 Rails
-Build applications on the Prototype, Rico, and script.aculo.us JavaScript
 libraries
-Manage network connections and web services

"We were careful to include a lot of detailed programming descriptions in
the hacks," says Perry. "As a result, many of them read like tutorials and
are appropriate to people who are completely new to Ajax (although it
helps to have some knowledge of XML, JavaScript, and DOM)."

Additional Resources:

Online demos of the hacks can be found at:
http://www.parkerriver.com/ajaxhacks/

For more information about the book, including author bio, see:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ajaxhks/index.html

For a cover graphic in JPEG format, go to:
ftp://ftp.ora.com/pub/graphics/book_covers/hi-res/0596101...

Ajax Hacks
Bruce Perry
ISBN: 0-596-10169-4, 414 pages, $29.99 US, $41.99 CA
order@oreilly.com
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