Head Rush Ajax

xxviii

Read Me

This is a learning experience, not a reference book. We deliberately stripped out

everything that might get in the way of learning whatever it is we’re working on at that

point in the book. And the rst time through, you need to begin at the beginning, because

the book makes assumptions about what you’ve already seen and learned.

We assume you are familiar with HTML and CSS.

It would take an entire book to teach you HTML and CSS (in fact, that’s exactly what

it took: Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML). We chose to focus this book on Ajax

programming, rather than rehash lots of markup and style that you could learn about in

other places.

We assume you’ve at least seen JavaScript code before.

It would take an entire book to teach you... oh, wait, we’ve already said that. Seriously,

JavaScript is a lot more than a simple scripting language, and we aren’t going to cover

all the ways you can use JavaScript in this book. You’ll learn about all the ways that

JavaScript is related to Ajax programming, and learn how to use JavaScript extensively to

add interaction to your web pages and make requests to a server.

However, if you’ve never written a line of JavaScript, aren’t at all familiar with functions

or curly braces, or have never programmed in any language before, you might want to

pick up a good JavaScript book and browse through it. If you want to plow into this book,

feel free—but we will be moving fairly quickly over the basics.

We don’t cover server-side programming ...