Ajax: The Definitive Guide
Anthony T. Holdener III
O’Reilly
ISBN-13: 978-0596528386
$49.99
Ajax isn’t a technology or
programming language as
we typically think of them—
rather it’s an agglomeration of
interrelated Web programming
techniques that, used together,
can make a website more responsive and interactive. So it’s fitting
that a book calling itself a definitive guide to Ajax should take on
a wide agglomeration of topics
as well. The book covers not
just how to code using Ajax, but
how to integrate
Ajax tools into a
well-thought-out,
accessible, and
standards-driven
website.
Ajax is an
innovative use of
familiar technologies, and there are
a wide range of
libraries to help
make some of even the most
advanced interactions relatively
simple to implement. Holdener
uses the fact that he is standing
on the shoulders of a decade’s
worth of Web developers to not
repeat things that will be familiar
to his audience, instead he goes
deeper into the concepts that
should underlie a good website.
Graphical design layout principles and the core concepts of
user-centered design, to which
typical coding handbooks provide glancing attention at best,
receive appropriate and thoughtful treatment here. Holdener
even devotes an entire chapter to
errors—which ones need to be
communicated to the database,
which ones need to be surfaced
to the user, and how to present
errors in a user-friendly way. The
thoughtful meticu-
lousness this chapter
exemplifies is evi-
denced everywhere in
this hefty volume.
Although the
book is most likely
to be opened by
coders looking for
the specifics of how
to build a drag and
drop shopping cart
or use the Flickr API, Holdener’s
deep concern for the full uni-
verse of issues involved in Web
design and development shines
through. I can only hope that his
good advice will convert a few of
those harried coders to his way
of thinking.
New Tech, New Ties: How
Mobile Communication is
Reshaping Social Cohesion
Rich Ling
The MIT Press
ISBN-13: 978-0262122979
$24.95
Last year, I got to observe
a study of people in their
20s who were heavy mobile
phone users. As part of the
study they were asked, with
very little advance notice,
to turn off their cell phones
for a Saturday. To their
surprise, none of them had
any real problems with the
assignment—except the one
young man who’d made plans
to meet friends at the beach.
Without the ability to coordinate on the fly, they had to
be much more specific about
how they would meet up.
Mobile technology gives us
the ability to be in touch all
the time and has changed the
way in which we relate to
each other. Rich Ling uses
