Teach Yourself Ajax, JavaScript, and PHP All in One

Book Preface

Over the last decade or so, the World Wide Web has grown in scope from being a relatively simple information repository to becoming the first stop for many people when seeking entertainment, education, news, or business resources.

Websites themselves need no longer be limited to a number of static pages containing text and perhaps simple images; the tools now available allow the development of highly interactive and engaging pages involving animations, visual effects, context-sensitive content, embedded productivity tools, and much more.

The list of technologies available for producing such pages is broad. However, those based on Open Source licenses have become, and remain, highly popular due to their typically low (often zero) entry cost, and to the huge resource of user-contributed scripts, tutorials, tools, and other resources for these tools and applications available via the Internet and elsewhere.

In this book, we give a detailed account of how to program fluid, interactive websites using server- and client-side coding techniques and tools, as well as how to combine these to produce a slick, desktop-application-like user experience using Ajax.

The programming languages used in this book include the ubiquitous JavaScript (for client-side programming) and the immensely popular open-source PHP language (for server- side scripting, and available with the majority of web-hosting packages). The nuts and bolts of Ajax programming are described in detail, as well as the use of several advanced open-source frameworks that contain ready-written code for quickly building state-of-theart interactive sites.