AJAX and PHP: Building Responsive Web Applications: Amazon.co.uk: Cristian Darie, Bogdan Brinzarea, Filip Chereches-Tosa, Mihai Bucicia: Books

Product Description

Building Responsive Web Applications with AJAX and PHP is the most practical and efficient resource a reader can get to enter the exciting world of AJAX. This book will teach you how to create faster, lighter, better web applications by using the AJAX ingredients technologies to their full potential. Assuming a basic knowledge of PHP, XML, JavaScript and MySQL, this book will help you understand how the heart of AJAX beats and how the constituent technologies work together. After teaching the foundations, the book will walk you through eight real-world case studies covering tasks you’ll be likely to need for your own applications: - AJAX enabled form-validation page - Online chat room - Customized type-ahead text entry solution, that helps users find the help page for the PHP functions - A simple cards game that supports multiple simultaneous sessions - Whiteboard where online users can draw online - Database-enabled, editable and customizable data grid - RSS aggregator application - Use the script.aculo.us JavaScript toolkit to build a drag&drop enabled sortable list The appendixes guide you through installing your working environment, using powerful tools that enable debugging, improving, and profiling your code, working with XSLT and XPath, and working with existing AJAX frameworks.

About the Author

Filip Chereches-Tosa is a web developer and entrepreneur, with a strong belief in the future of web-based software and open source. He started his career at the age of 9, programming BASIC on a Commodore 64.Filip blogs in Romanian on www.filipcte.ro and is an active member of the largest IT communities in Romania. He's always involved in side-projects, one of the latest being jobberBase (www.jobberbase.com), open source job board software that he extracted from www.jobber.ro (a successful Romanian IT job board). Bogdan has a strong background in Computer Science holding a Master and Bachelor Degree at the Automatic Control and Computers Faculty of the Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania and also an Auditor diploma at the Computer Science department at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France. His main interests cover a wide area from embedded programming, distributed and mobile computing and new web technologies. Currently, he is employed as an Alternative Channels Specialist at Banca Romaneasca, Member of National Bank of Greece where he is responsible for the Internet Banking project and coordinates other projects related to security applications and new technologies to be implemented in the banking area. Cristian Darie is a software engineer with experience in a wide range of modern technologies, and the author of numerous books, including his popular AJAX and PHP tutorial by Packt, his ASP.NET E-Commerce tutorial, by APress and his forthcoming SEO tutorial for PHP developers by Wrox Press. Cristian is studying distributed application architectures for his PhD, and is getting involved with various commercial and research projects. When not planning to buy Google, he enjoys his bit of social life. If you want to say "hi", you can reach Cristian through his personal website at http://www.cristiandarie.ro. Mihai Bucica started programming and competing in programming contests (winning many of them), all at age twelve.With a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Automatic Control and Computers Faculty of the Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania, Bucica works on building communication software with various electronic markets. Even after working with a multitude of languages and technologies, Bucica's programming language of choice remains C++, and he loves the LGPL word. Mihai also co-authored Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce and he be contacted through his personal website, www.valentinbucica.ro.

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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful

Excellent 14 May 2006

By K. Naylor

Format:Paperback

This book is ideal if you already know PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and have heard of AJAX but not had the opportunity to explore it further. If you want to try AJAX but have never come accross a scenario to use it, this book provides some excellent examples which can form the basis of great projects.

The theory behind all the technologies used is very clearly explained, without boring you with detail about obvious things. Right from the first chapter you start learning by examples. The examples can be easily adapted to many web projects and they cover stuff that is both useful and fun.

I have found this book very enjoyable - the best I've bought in a while.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

Excellent 25 Feb 2007

By Michael Carroll

I found this book to be an excellent introduction to AJAX for anybody with a good working knowledge of PHP, JavaScript and MySQL. Clear and concise with the example code well explained and presented.

Personally, I already had the background knowledge but had no experience of and very little knowledge of AJAX. I really needed a crash course in AJAX technologies. Two hours with this book changed that. I found it's concise approach fantastic and it is a book I can see myself returning to again and again.

Overall, highly recommended, a great introduction to AJAX and a most enjoyable read.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful

Pulp? 31 Jan 2007

By Martin

I was very disappointed to see that most of the book is made up of repeated source code examples. Parts of it is well written but it is very hard to get an overview and to me, it seems, this book was primarily made to make a bit of money while Ajax was still unknown and perplex. Although the authors give some fine examples of how to use the xml that Ajax is based on they don't care to explain how to expand your own knowledge and understanding beyond the simple examples they provide.

If you are satisfied with copying the source code shown in the book then this might be the book for you, but if you want to learn Ajax properly you should probably buy another book.

Also, it had the worst typography I have ever experienced, the pages looked as if they were printed from a cheap ink-printer!

I feel sorry for writing such a harsh review but there are so many parts that are missing. It could have been a good book with a little more effort.

I would be very careful about buying any books from this publisher.