FoA Reviewed On Relevance
Justin Gehtland recently posted some reviews of the first round of Ajax books; for his take on Foundations of Ajax click here (thanks to Brent Ashley for pointing these out to me - Justin must have switched his RSS feed recently because I had to modify my subscription in Bloglines). First off, I appreciate Justin’s kind words about me personally and as I think is obvious from my NF Quotes post and my summary of day 2 entry, the feeling is mutual! All in all, I like Justin’s take on the book and he’s one of the few that really got what we were trying to do - Ryan and I have always felt that the real strengths of FoA are the tools chapters. While IDEs are catching up, we’re largely on our own when it comes to coding JavaScript - which is why we spent a good chunk of the book writing about the developer’s toolbox.
As I mentioned in the comments, we would have covered the libraries in more depth than a short appendix but at the time we wrote the book (nearly a year ago now…wow, time really flies) it really wasn’t clear who the “winners” would be and while the space is still wide open, there is at least some consolidation around frameworks like Dojo, Prototype, and script.aculo.us. That said, we *will* be covering them (along with others) in our next book - Pro Ajax with Java (more of that soon!). If we ever write a second edition of FoA, we will certainly keep Justin’s remarks in mind.
Anyway, thanks for the review Justin and I really hope we’ll have some time to chat at RailsConf!