Anyone involved in software development would have, at some time, heard of the pragmatic programmers series of books.

The books have a superb approach learning that makes it very easy indeed to grasp the concepts they are imparting.

Their website contains their entire print catalogue ready for order and as well as the paper version of the book you can download PDF versions that are specially crafted just for you, imprinted with your own personal monogram (OK it’s your name) by a team of gerbils no less…

You can also buy beta versions of books giving you the chance to read them as they are being written. With regular updates you can get ahead of the game on the very latest versions of your chosen tipple. there are lots of Ruby books as well and some very good career development titles.

Payment choices are Credit card and now they also have PayPal as a choice if you don’t have a credit card or just prefer to handle your purchases through Paypal.

Prices are very reasonable and you get a discount if you buy the paper plus PDF version of a book so you can have a handy reference version in your pocket as well as a copy to read on the train… cool!

so pop on over and take a look at what they have got.

Regular readers know I am a fan of the Prototype JS Library and the accompanying Script.aculo.us library.  Despite moving into EXT at work, I still like to stay in touch with Prototype and still use it at home.  1.6 is a big leap forward and includes some really nice changes.

Ajaxian have a long and reasonably detailed post on the subject so I won’t re-invent the wheel here, it’s worth checking the new releases out and there’s now a book that will help you get the most from this pair of awesome script libraries.

Technorati Tags: Prototype 1.6, Script.aculo.us 1.8

If, like me you have been following the development of Microsoft’s own flavour of Ajax, codenamed Atlas, for the past six months or so then you won’t be surprised to know that they have released Beta 1 of what will become the released version of the product.

If you never heard of Atlas then fear not.  Atlas, or MS Ajax as I will now call it, is simply Microsoft’s take on the whole AJAX Scene.  AJAX is not a new technology but thanks to Google and a fair few other key players it has become the new must have technology on the web.

AJAX is actually an acronym that stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML.  It’s a bit of a mouthful I’ll grant you but its simply a tying together of the different technologies in web development in such a manner that web pages no longer act as a collection of static pages served up on demand.  With AJAX web developers can build web pages that are far more interractive with fewer post packs (page refreshes) because many of the operations on the page happen asynchronously so there’s no need to wait for one operation to complete before another starts.

So What is so special about Microsoft’s offering?  To be honest, not a lot.  the main difference between Microsoft’s version of AJAX and the myriad other AJAX libraries out there is that it is designed to tie in very closely with ASP .net 2.0 allowing developers using ASP .Net to incorporate AJAX into their applications.

Microsoft are not the only ones out there doing this though.
Ajax Pro and Script.Aculo.Us.netare but two I can mention, I’m certain that a quick ten minutes in Google will produce information on others.

Is it worth looking at the Microsoft offering?  I think so.  It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but the fact that Microsoft themselves are encouraging a community input on the project, and in some cases even making changes as demanded by the community, is encouraging.  The whole project has another upside to as we all get a deeper insight into the Microsoft Developer mindset.  This is encouraging as we get to see that microsoft Developers are not gods after all, they are just damn good at what they do, as are we all.

You can get hold of MS Ajax, and join in with the community here.

If, like me you also enjoy developing non ASP.Net Web Sites and fancy experimenting with adding Atlas to your projects, you may be interested in checking out Mochikit, Script.Aculo.Us, Rico, and the fantastic Prototype framework that most if not all of the Ajax libraries out there are based on.

I have not gone into great detail on any of these libraries here deliberately.  I have often fallen into the trap of simply reading up on one website all about a particular subject and not actually getting my hands dirty.  the result of this is that you know a lot and know nothing all at the same time.  Knowing that you can do x with y is not the same as knowing how to do x with y.  so go and play and then blog your results so we all benefit a little.

Coffee of the Day is Café Elvis, a dark roast from a small farm in Honduras, caffein rush level: 7/10