April 2007
Intermediate to advanced
720 pages
12h 52m
English
Content preview from Ajax Bible
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Chapter 2
Know Your JavaScript
IN THIS CHAPTER
- Understanding JavaScript properties and methods
- Storing your data in variables and arrays
- Making decisions with the if statement
- Looping with the for and while loops
- Connecting JavaScript to HTML buttons
Ajax is based on JavaScript, and this chapter is all about JavaScript. You're going to need a good foundation in JavaScript to tackle Ajax, and all the JavaScript you'll need to know is in this chapter. If you're already up to speed in JavaScript, you can skip this chapter and turn to Chapter 3, which gets into Ajax in depth.
What Is JavaScript's Place in Ajax?
Where does JavaScript belong in the scheme of things? It turns out that it's absolutely central; JavaScript is what makes Ajax work. To see that, take a look at an example.
This example downloads and displays text from a server. (You'll see what makes it tick in detail in the next chapter.) You can see this example in a Web browser in Figure 2.1.
FIGURE 2.1 An Ajax demo
When this application is hosted on a Web server, clicking the Fetch the Message button causes the application to use Ajax techniques behind the scenes to connect to the server and download the contents of a text file, data.txt. Here's what's in data.txt:
This text was fetched from the server with Ajax.
Clicking the button downloads the message from the server, without any page refresh needed. The downloaded ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.