Ajax Girl

Practical Javascript, DOM Scripting, and Ajax Projects picks up where Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax left off.

Frank Zammetti’s practical guide to real-world JavaScript and Ajax will have you developing actual client-side apps in no time. As more of a hacker than a theoretician, this kind of guide appeals to me. Usually when I start developing my own apps, some of the code used previously (in building sample apps) will be adapted and tweaked for my own purposes.

Some of the projects you’ll learn how to build in Practical Javascript:
* JSDigester - a library that simplifies (takes away the pain) of parsing XML on the client side
* Mashing up a list of hotels + a Yahoo Map for a user-entered zipcode
* Client-side persistence techniques
* A JavaScript validation framework
* Building widgets and working with UI widget frameworks
* Building a JavaScript mini-game (cool!)
* An Ajax-based client-server chat pplication

You can pick up a copy of Practical Javascript, DOM Scripting, and Ajax Projects at Amazon.com (avg. review score is 4.5 stars).

Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax will take you from knowing absolutely nothing about JavaScript to being able to manipulate the DOM, build basic Ajax applications and more.

Most of us who have been building websites since the pre-Ajax days learned JavaScript through a mish-mash of one-off scripts, validations, etc. If a book like this had been around, it surely would’ve offered a nice clean overview of the techniques available to the JavaScript programmer.

Luckily for the novice JavaScript programmer (or intermediate developer wishing to hone his craft), Beginning Javascript with DOM Scripting and Ajax does exist now and is the perfect way to learn the fundamentals from the ground up. The 2nd part of the book also focuses on Ajax and some of the interesting hacks one can use in that realm.

The author, Christian Heilmann, has a geeky sense of humor that keeps the reading light — for eaxmple Et Tu, Cache? (pg. 309):

Safari is the main offender as it caches the response status and does not trigger the changes (remember that the status returns the HTTP code 200, 304 or 404) any longer.

Adding this snippet tells the browser to test whether the data has changed since a certain date, i.e.:

request.setRequestHeader( ‘If-Modified-Since’, ‘Thu, 06 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT’);
request.send( null );

A bit out of context here, but just one example of the kind of thing you’ll find in Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax.

XHTML gives us the ability to extend our markup with customized, semantically meaningful attributes. While the battle between class and attribute might be a holy war to some (and unknown to most others) the fact remains that attribute name value pairs are easier to read and understand, and only attributes allow you to associate a value with your meta-data. Extending XHTML elements in my projects has made me think of how to solve problems in new and better ways. It has made me a stronger JavaScript artisan. In this article, I explain several examples and provide functions for working with your own custom attributes.

http://digg.com/programming/Attributes_Classes_Custom_DOM_Attributes_for_Fun_and_Profit

XHTML gives us the ability to extend our markup with customized, semantically meaningful attributes. While the battle between class and attribute might be a holy war to some (and unknown to most others) the fact remains that attribute name value pairs are easier to read and understand, and only attributes allow you to associate a value with your meta-data. Extending XHTML elements in my projects has made me think of how to solve problems in new and better ways. It has made me a stronger JavaScript artisan. In this article, I explain several examples and provide functions for working with your own custom attributes.

http://digg.com/programming/Attributes_Classes_Custom_DOM_Attributes_for_Fun_and_Profit