Rating: 

There are no explanations of technologies and concepts that surround Ajax, therefore, given the state of the code, there is not a lot of reason to work through the book. In fact, this is the first computer book that I returned to the seller, simply because I found so little reason to keep it on my bookshelf.

The writing in the introductory chapter gives promise, but as the book progresses the code quickly becomes dense and the organization and writing becomes unacceptably thin. I expected more from O'Reilly.

Before I gave up on this book, I was half way through it, and only one code set had ran correctly from build on. For example, the author's code has at least four variations of the basic application URL sprinkled among the Javascript and build files of the first four examples. Finding and correcting the URL was annoying but not difficult, but even after that, the examples did not run without further debugging.

I finally threw up my hands and surrendered... defeated by the author's rush to publication.