Stance regarding other books

[Valentin Crettaz]

Dear authors,

I apologize in advance if my questions have already been asked before, but I couldn't find similar posts. Please direct me to them if there are any.

I've been reviewing and technically editing quite a few books on Ajax since 2005 and I would like to know how your book compares to the best-selling Ajax books out there. By "how it compares", I mean what substantial added-value is provided in Enterprise Ajax that isn't in other books on the subject in your opinion.

When I see a title like this one, no need to say that my expectations are pretty high. I'm actively developing Ajax applications in my day-to-day job and I've read many books on the subject and until now they all seem (except a couple special ones) to boil down to explaining what Ajax is and isn't. All what is different is the author-specific ways of explaining things, plus a couple topics on very specific areas.

Also, in another post, you mentioned that you were not presenting any JS/Ajax library in this book, which is fair. However, the fact of delivering a book on Ajax for the enterprise world means that some kind of productivity must be palpable in your distillation of Ajax wisdom. Yet, I don't see how one can be productive by not using libraries and frameworks nowadays. Maybe when I get to see the book, I'll understand right away why there is no third-party library code in your book. Could you shed some light one this?

Thanks in advance for your commitment.
[ July 24, 2007: Message edited by: Valentin Crettaz ]

[Dave Charles Johnson]

Thanks for the question Valentin.

There are a few differentiators between Enterprise Ajax and other books available on the topic of Ajax.

First of all we take a close look at some of the features of the language and how classical development approaches (inheritance, interfaces etc) are achievable in the JavaScript language. This means that rather than picking up a third party solution we give the readers the JavaScript tools to understand how things work under the hood and are able to relate them to classical languages like Java or C#.

We also discuss topics that are rarely touched on by other books such as design, testing, debugging, performance and deployment as well as security, caching, scaling and web services. We feel that all of these topics are of particular interest to enterprise developers.

Finally, we also spend a good deal of time in the book discussing some of the softer issues in Ajax such as usability, accessibility, and even look at some enterprise case studies of how real companies are leveraging Ajax in their enterprise solutions.

[Valentin Crettaz]

Thanks a lot dave, I appreciate. I'm eager to put my eyes on your book