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It’s been quite a heady few weeks around here – we got our author copies last week and the book looks fantastic! If you ordered early, your copy should be shipping soon (depending on where you bought it). Anyway, we have our first Amazon review by one of the sherifs at good old JavaRanch (founded by Kathy Sierra) and it’s 5 stars! Yeah us! Mr. Friedman-Hill really captured what Ryan and I were trying to do with Foundations of Ajax in his last paragraph:

As someone who has already learned the basics of Ajax, however, I found the second half of the book even more valuable. The last few chapters talk about tools and techniques for building real-life professional-grade applications. There is excellent, detailed information about documenting, unit testing and debugging for JavaScript, debugging Ajax communications, and using some of the newfangled Ajax frameworks that have begun to appear. These chapters credibly demonstrate that it’s possible to treat JavaScript as a Serious Programming Language.

Our Sales Rank has been great and we’ve found ourselves in the top 25 in the Computers and Internet category. If you ever write a book you’ll be amazed how often you check your Sales Rank – I now fully understand Dave Thomas’ example project in the Ruby session I attended at No Fluff Just Stuff…

Of course another thing you do when you write a book is check out the reviews. So far, they’ve been pretty positive. We were mentioned on Joel on Software, one of my favorite sites. Here’s the piece. I believe the first review officially belongs to adminspotting and you can find that here. We got 8/10 with two points deducted for our Java based focus. Honestly, the Java thing is something Ryan and I talked about a lot in the early days. At one point we were seriously considering throwing in Ruby and/or C# but ultimately we decided that the server side language really didn’t matter – in fact many of the examples use XML to mock the server. It also didn’t hurt that our expertise is in Java (sorry, neither or us has done PHP so I dispute the claim that everyone knows PHP!) Still, a nice write-up, thanks! Here’s a quote:

I read this book in hopes of getting a good understanding of [Ajax] and not just what the hype says. I definitely reached that goal with this book. Ryan and Nathaniel did a very nice job at putting together an unbiased tutorial of what Ajax is and how to use it. I say unbiased because instead of writing something along the lines of “Just use it! It rules!”, they gave, both, the positives and negatives to using Ajax

Another positive review comes from Fred On Something, you can find the link here. I particularly like the last paragraph:

This is a definitive book for web developers having to spring into Ajax’s application development world. It will show you the most effective programming techniques, tips, and tricks to create interactive web pages. It will explain you how to use the best free available tools to create your Ajax developer’s toolbox. It is an interesting reading striped of any fluff with an incalculable number of illustrations and examples.

Jeff Nolan was kind enough to link to Fred’s post here. Ryan and I are like you – we develop software for a living and we don’t have unlimited free time. While our book certainly isn’t the longest one on the market, we consciously tried to deliver what you needed without a lot of fat. I don’t know about you, but my favorite books tend to be pretty focused (in other words, short) and I’m really interested in the new Pragmatic Fridays concept.

Greg Hughes has a good piece here. I like this quote (especially the usable part):

So, go get this book and start to put that XMLHttpRequest object to work for you. Go build something usable and cool. Probably the one big thing that impressed me about this book was the fact that it pushes a test-driven/test-first approach to development (using JSUnit) and the fact that it has so many detailed, in-depth code samples and discussions. It doesn’t just present code samples though. It takes you through the how’s and the why’s, which is cool.

We have another review on Ajax by Kishore that you can find here – it provides a good overview of the book with a chapter by chapter breakdown. All in all, Ryan and I are quite pleased with what we’ve read so far (and if somehow we’ve missed your review or comments, please let me know!) And for those of you that think we and the authors of the other books on Ajax are “opportunistic” I hope you realize that technical books don’t make their authors rich. Heck, given the number of hours we put in since April we would have been better off working at McDonalds. There are lots of great articles out there (are those authors opportunistic? They were paid for their efforts) but I assure you our book goes beyond what can be presented in a couple of thousand words.

If you’re looking for a reason to buy our book I point to chapters 4-8. Not only do we give you some great examples to get you jump started on Ajax, we provide some excellent information on a sampling of tools that will make your life much easier (at least they’ve helped us!) One other thing I want to point out – all of our examples were written using NetBeans, Ryan on his Windows box, me on my Mac. For those of you that haven’t tried NetBeans in a while, I highly recommend taking it for a spin. The 5.0 Beta is out – Ryan has been playing with it for quite a while and he gives it a big thumbs up.

Thanks to all of you that have reviewed our book – please keep the comments coming. As I said, if I missed something please let me know.