Head Rush Ajax

ix

Intro

Your brain on Ajax. Here you are trying to learn something, and your brain is

doing you a favor by making sure the learning doesn’t stick. Your brain’s thinking, “Better

leave room for more important things, like which wild animals to avoid and whether naked

snowboarding is a bad idea.” So how do you trick your brain into thinking that your life

depends on knowing how to program asynchronously?

Who is this book for? xxii

W

e know what your brain is thinking xxiii

Metacognition xxv

Bend your brain into submission xxvii

Read Me xxviii

Technical reviewers xxx

Acknowledgments xxxi

Table of Contents (summary)

Intro xxi

1 Using Ajax: web applications for a new generation 1

2 Speaking the Language: making ajax requests 65

Interlude 127

3 She Blinded Me with Asynchrony: asynchronous apps 139

4 Web Page Forestry: the document object model 201

4.5 A Second Helping: devloping dom applications 243

5 Saying More with POST: post requests 277

Interlude 317

6 More Than Words Can Say: xml requests and responses 335

7 A Fight to the Finish: json versus xml 369

Appendix 1: A Few Special Bonus Gifts: extras 391

Appendix 2: “All I Want Is the Code”: ajax and dom utilities 401

Index 407

Table of Contents (the real thing)

x

1

Using Ajax

web applications for a new generation

Put a new shine on your web applications.

Tired of clunky web interfaces and waiting around for a page to reload? ...