I’ll start my book-blog with a Web2.0 book (makes kinda sense, or does it?)
When I was approached to create a website once more (I did my last back in 2001) I thought that I can’t rely on HTML, CSS and some basic PHP/MySQL any more – with all this web2.0 stuff around. So, what to do?
I went to my favourite book-store (this time, it was not amazon…), and found a book called “Head Rush Ajax“.
Well – I never read a book like this one. However many stars I would have to rate it, I would give them to this book – because it’s simply one of the best educational books I have ever encountered. Its style is fresh (but not “hey-guys-look-how-cewl-I-am”), it’s layout is terrific (but not “lets-see-how-many-pictures-I-get-on-one-page”) and the educational effects are just great. There are only 7 chapters – but you learn everything about all this web2.0 tools, starting from asynchronous requests involving JavaScript, going on to some cool DOM-stuff and ending with JSON and XML (by the way, this book opened my eyes regarding XML – I finally got the point about it. 
Now, there is no reference – and sometimes, PHP and Javascript (of course, as well as CSS and HTML) is just used without further explanations (ok, sometimes there actually *are* explanations, but not as in-depth as some people might wish). But then, this book is no reference and no “teach-me-PHP-or-javascript” – it’s “teach-me-AJAX”. And that’s what it does.
I just notice that I can’t really describe the visual and textual style of this book (and it *is* still a workbook – there are exercises, but they were the first exercises in books like these I actually completed) – you might want to look at headfirstlabs.com for an impression.
As already said: n stars out of n!
