With the sudden popularity of Ajax, books about it started to appear like mushrooms after rain.
I found Ajax to be an exciting technology, but I also found that explaining it requires no more than a handful of pages - not enough for writing a whole book.
That's why, it seems, every book related to Ajax is actually about Ajax and something else: some are about JavaScript, some are about patterns, some mention hacks etc.
The first thing I enjoyed when browsing 'Ajax Design Patterns' at a local bookstore was the respect the author showed towards the reader - clearly the reader was assumed to have solid Software Engineering background (not necessary heavy on HTML, XML or JavaScript). I found a couple of other Ajax books I browsed at the store quite irrelevant to a professional software engineer (the one example that comes to mind: explaining the meaning of the assignment (=) operator, and how that is different from the compare (==) operator, well, you get the point).
In any way this book is a lot about Ajax, which I appreciate, as it was the reason I needed it for, but also a lot about web design patterns, which are not strictly related to Ajax (some of those patterns can use JavaScript with minimal or no communications to the server, for example).
In summary, this book is excellent reading on Ajax and on Web/UI design; in particular, next to every design pattern, there are innumerable references to actual web sites using that pattern.
Several tools and examples are available for download from this site, which should be a boost to create my first few Ajax applications.
Finally, a large number of tools available to Ajax developers are listed as added bonus.
One area which I would like to see a bit more developed is the server side - true, there are lots of published works on SOAP, AXIS etc, but it would be nice to have a bit more about Ajax-related server side technologies in a client Ajax-related book (this book does offer server-side tips and examples but on a minimal scale, using simple PHP examples).
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