Every once in awhile you form a fondness for a book even though it is not a particularly good book. In this particular case, I knew that Ajax in 10 minutes by Phil Ballard would not be of the quality I usually expect out of technical books the moment I picked it up. Fate is the contents of the bookshelf near the massage chair.

My full summary can be found here.

Despite being from a publisher that prides itself as being for "When you only have time for the answers®", the book was quite educational. It started with a refresher of web technologies, went into an excruciatingly detailed description of how to use the XMLHTTPRequest object to interact with the server and update a web page, described some other technologies that are useful with Ajax, and finished off with a description of several libraries.

Overall, this book could have said the same thing a lot more concisely. At the same time, it could have included more details about error checking and programming defensively (I don't expect every code snippet to be bullet proof, but at least point out the potential trouble spots!). That said, I still learned a lot, and I will always have a fondness for this book since it was my first complete overview of Ajax.