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I appreciate this book for what it is, which is to provide a high-level introduction to ASP.NET AJAX in an accessible format. This book was great for the basics, but it is sorely lacking in topics that you will need to apply AJAX to the real world, such as advanced scripting and different scenarios for using update panel triggers. I give this book 4 stars because it is good for what it is, and I recommend it if you are absolutely new to AJAX. I highly recommend another title “ASP.NET AJAX in Action” for an excellent treatment of advanced AJAX topics. In other words, the real world.
Rating: 4 / 5

Unlike this book, The Sams Teach Yourself Ajax 3.5 book was great and easy to get through. I am a web developer for ColdFusion but new to ASP so it was a great beginning. This book seemed the logical next step but it has been a pain to get through. First off, there seems to be a lot of cut and paste text from MSDN. List after list of classes etc. Very few chapters actually guide you through examples that you can implement on your own. When you do get to some there are poor directions for what steps you need to do and then the code supplied is snippets with no way to see the full code to troubleshoot. Chapter 9 has a section on error handling using Ajax. I keep getting errors even though I finally cut and paste the code straight from the Informix web site. It would be really helpful if I could have downloaded the files in this example rather than read code snippets. So I’m stuck with this example and have to move on to the next. Not how a step-by-step book should go. Also, the writing style is so dry that its numbing to read more than half a page. Like bored professors reciting from memory. Skip this book and get the ASP.Net 3.5 book instead or something else.
Rating: 1 / 5