I am a very experienced C# developer with intermediate AJAX skills



The good:

This book is easy to read actually it's enjoyable. It has a lot of useful information about design patterns, various AJAX libraries and cool things you can do with them. There are a lot of good tips. The examples are excellent and done in light weight code which means you dont have to chew through a lot of logic and interlocking classes to get the point. I hated that about Jessie Liberty's books, good as they are.



The bad:

The easy to read text is written in breathless blog style. Why use one word where three will do the job? Appropriate for a blog, but I find it annoying in a text book. I find some of his code rather strange. He uses a class full of constants to hold various strings, when the modern style is to do this declaratively in the config file. He builds paths using string operations when the .NET Path class provides a suite of methods to do this that are easier, more compact and more dependable than any homegrown code. Finally, there is almost no treatment of the Microsoft AJAX framework. This is not really a flaw but I bought this book assuming that the framework would be the main topic.



This book is not for beginners. One needs to know the basics of ASP.NET and AJAX before reading it. Flaws not withstanding, this is a very good book and every ASP.NET AJAX developer needs a copy.