Is Ajax a new technology, or the same old stuff web developers have been using for years? Both, actually. This book demonstrates not only how tried-and-true web standards make Ajax possible, but how these older technologies allow you to give sites a decidedly modern Web 2.0 feel. Ajax: The Definitive Guide explains how to use standards like JavaScript, XML, CSS, and XHTML, along with the XMLHttpRequest object, to build browser-based web applications that function like desktop programs. You get a complete background on what goes into today's web sites and applications, and learn to leverage these tools along with Ajax for advanced browser searching, web services, mashups, and more. You discover how to turn a web browser and web site into a true application, and why developing with Ajax is faster, easier and cheaper.
Who is this book for?
Who should probably back away from this book?
If you can answer “yes” to all of these:
We’ll help you learn how to
write JavaScript code that
makes web pages do all kinds
of cool things that are
impossible with HTML alone.
If you can answer “yes” to any of these:
this book is for you.
this book is not for you.
[Note from marketing: this book is
for anyone with a credit card.]
Do you have access to a computer with a web browser, a
text editor, and an Internet connection?
1
Do you want to learn, understand, and remember
how to create web pages that are alive with energy,
turning the Web into a truly interactive experience?
2
Do you prefer stimulating dinner party conversation to
dry, dull, academic lectures?
3
Are you completely new to creating web pages?
(You don’t need to be an HTML guru, but you should
understand the basics of how web pages go together
with HTML and CSS, and how to post them online.)
1
Do you hold a ninth degree black belt in Script Fu, and
are really looking for a JavaScript reference book?
2
Are you afraid to try something different? Would you
rather have a root canal than mix stripes with plaid?
Do you believe that a technical book can’t be serious if
JavaScript code is anthropomorphized?
3
This book makes a great sequel
to Head First HTML with
CSS & XHTML, so definitely
check it out if you want to
brush up on your HTML
“We’ve had a website for years now, but it hardly pays for itself.”
“Our site’s pulling in more than 30% of our revenue, at a far lower cost than our
other venues.”
There’s a world of difference between these two very real Internet experiences. Yet they
provide a window into the landscape of web survival that plays out daily. Success is the
result of a multitude of adaptations to this constantly changing environment. The fate of
companies worldwide is at stake, yet few players grasp the full scope of the problem.
Fewer still can clearly and thoroughly articulate its solution: website optimization.
Ultimately, website optimization (WSO) is about maximizing the (usually financial)
return on a website investment. Research shows that attaining that ultimate goal is
dependent upon fulfilling a set of known benchmarks, including making the site easier
to find, easier to use, faster, more aesthetically pleasing, cheaper to run, and more
compelling. Site stakeholders need accurate resources that spell out best-in-class,
proven strategies and methods to reach those benchmarks, and thereby attain success.
I wrote this book to fill this need. By reading it, you will learn a comprehensive set of
optimization techniques for transforming your website into a more successful profitgeneration
machine. You’ll save money by shifting your marketing budget from hit-ormiss
mass marketing to highly targeted, online marketing with measurable results.
WSO will teach you how to engage more customers by making your site more
compelling and easier for search engine users to find. Part I, Search Engine Marketing
Optimization, will teach you how to use natural search engine optimization (SEO),
pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and conversion rate optimization (CRO) to boost
your site’s visibility and convert browsers into buyers. Part II, Web Performance
Optimization, will help you optimize your HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS),
multimedia, and Ajax to improve response times and reliability. You will learn that
these two components of WSO have synergistic effects; faster sites convert more
users, save money on bandwidth bills, and even improve potential search engine
rankings, while search-friendly sites built with standards-based CSS are faster and
more accessible......
The Web has re volutio nized the wa y we access and share infor matio n. In
just two decades, it has become the global platform for delivering and consuming services.
The pervasiveness and ubiquity of the Web stems from the way it combines architectural
simplicity with a small set of widely accepted technologies. The Web provides
scalability, security, and reliability for those systems that embrace its simple tenets, and
it does so using commodity tools and platforms.
Our goal in this book is twofold: to demystify the Web as an application platform and
to showcase how web architecture can be applied to common enterprise computing
problems. Throughout the chapters, we make it a point to demonstrate how services
can leverage the Web both inside and outside enterprise boundaries. Our vision is of
an information platform that is open and available to other systems, which eschews
integration in favor of composition, and yet implements valuable business behaviors: a
distributed, hypermedia-driven application platform.
You don’t have to know REST or HTTP in detail in order to understand this book. We’ll
take you from simple integration through to sophisticated business protocols, all with
detailed code examples that you can adapt for your own ends......
Design patterns and object-oriented programming. They hold such
promise to make your life as a software designer and developer easier.
Their terminology is bandied about every day in the technical
and even the popular press. But it can be hard to learn them, to
become proficient with them, to understand what is really going on.
Perhaps you have been using an object-oriented or object-based
language for years. Have you learned that the true power of objects
is not inheritance but is in “encapsulating behaviors”? Perhaps you
are curious about design patterns and have found the literature a
bit too esoteric and high-falutin. If so, this book is for you......
This is a book about achieving complete web visibility. If you’re involved in something
web-based—and these days, everything is web-based—you need to understand the
things on the Web that affect you. Of course, today, everything affects you, which
means looking far beyond what visitors did on your site to the communities and competitors
with which you’re involved.
While the Web is a part of our daily lives, web visibility lags far behind. Web operators
seldom have a complete understanding of how visitors interact with their sites, how
healthy their web properties are, what online communities are saying about their organizations,
or what their competitors are up to. What little visibility they do have is
fragmented and imperfect.
It doesn’t have to be this way. In recent years, advances in monitoring, search, data
collection, and reporting have made it possible to build a far more comprehensive picture
of your web presence.
This book will show you how to answer some fundamental questions about that
presence:
• What did visitors do on my site?
• How did they go about doing it?
• Why did they do it in the first place?
• Could they do it, or was it broken or slow?
• What are people saying about my organization elsewhere?
• How do I compare to my competitors?
Among the tests you perform on web applications, security testing is perhaps the most important, yet it's often the
most neglected. The recipes in the Web Security Testing Cookbook demonstrate how developers and testers can check
for the most common web security issues, while conducting unit tests, regression tests, or exploratory tests. Unlike ad
hoc security assessments, these recipes are repeatable, concise, and systematic-perfect for integrating into your
regular test suite. Recipes cover the basics from observing messages between clients and servers to multi-phase tests
that script the login and execution of web application features. By the end of the book, you'll be able to build tests
pinpointed at Ajax functions, as well as large multi-step tests for the usual suspects: cross-site scripting and injection
attacks. This book helps you:
Obtain, install, and configure useful-and free-security testing tools
Understand how your application communicates with users, so you can better simulate attacks in your tests
Choose from many different methods that simulate common attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting,
and manipulating hidden form fields
Make your tests repeatable by using the scripts and examples in the recipes as starting points for automated
tests
Don't live in dread of the midnight phone call telling you that your site has been hacked. With Web Security Testing
Cookbook and the free tools used in the book's examples, you can incorporate security coverage into your test suite,
and sleep in peace.
