Last night I finished ASP.NET AJAX in Action, which is my first thorough introduction to ASP.NET AJAX, and I absolutely loved the book.
The content is a nice balance of theory, pragmatism, and insight that keeps you entertained and educated in a very gentle and practical manner. The chapters seemed to flow by with ease, building your confidence for more of the expert guidance that you find at the end of the book where it discusses building components and extenders and using the AJAX Control Toolkit and future technology.
My personal interest was the beginning and intermediate knowledge at the front of the book, which taught me all I wanted to know about calling web services and pagemethods on the server to get data to the client and display it on the browser. During that time I ended up learning about the page lifecycle on the client, event handling, asynchronous communication, dynamic display of data on the browser, the ASP.NET AJAX API and Javascript Libraries, etc. Chapters 6 and 7 provided a good understanding of how to work with the UpdatePanel and more under-the-hood details. That has me reviewing some past UpdatePanel configurations and implementations in pet projects to conform to more proven practices mentioned in the book.
One of the concerns you get with multi-author books is changes in coding and writing style from chapter-to-chapter that may interrupt the flow of reading. I am happy to report the book flowed well all the way through regardless of the fact that there were 3 authors. Nice job.
My only minor disappointment is that I could have used one little chapter on using ASP.NET AJAX with Silveright 1.0. Not an in-depth study, of course, but just a little getting started chapter that showed how to add Silverlight into the mix and reasons one might do so. I say this mostly because I was painfully doing this last night without a Silverlight Book and it was hit and miss using resources all over the Internet. I guess it is time for my first Silverlight Book :)
I haven't read other ASP.NET AJAX books, but I personally find ASP.NET AJAX IN ACTION a great book and well-worth reading.
by David Hayden