Wireside Chat with Rebecca Riordan (Author: Head First Ajax)

A brief but interesting conversation online with Rebecca M. Riordan, author of Head First Ajax (O’Reilly, 2008).

Ria Revolution [RR]: Hello Rebecca, Congratulations on authoring “Head First Ajax” (HFA). To get things started would you like to introduce yourself and tell us what inspired you to write this book?

Rebecca Riordan [Rebecca]: Thanks. I’ve been writing technical books for more years than I like to think about. The others are about databases in general and databases on the Microsoft Windows platform in particular. I’m disenchanted with the traditional tutorial format, so when Brett McLaughlin offered me Head First Ajax, I jumped at it. 

RR: The Head First Series has seen immense amounts of success as a beginner’s book. Is HFA targeted at beginners as well?

Rebecca: It’s targeted at beginners to Ajax, but not to web development. We assume the reader knows some basic XHTML, JavaScript and CSS, but they don’t need to be experts.

RR: In terms of coverage, what’s different in HFA as opposed to any other beginner’s book on Ajax?

Rebecca: I don’t think it’s _what_ gets said so much as _how_ it gets said. Any competent author will start a book like this by deciding what someone needs to get going. Given the same topic, the answers are going to be more-or-less the same. What sets HF Ajax apart, like all the HF books, is that the presentation is based on cognitive theory that makes it much, MUCH easier for the reader to actually absorb the information being presented. It’s a very different creature from the “exposition followed by walk-through” of a standard tutorial.

RR: Is there any part of the book that may excite a seasoned Ajax developer as well?

Rebecca: There may be some stuff in the two chapters on DOM that are new to seasoned developers, but frankly, I would be surprised if anybody who’s done more than a couple of Ajax apps found much to get excited about. I suspect the Marketing department will probably burn me in effigy for saying that, but I don’t think misrepresenting a book isn’t in anybody’s long-term best interest. This book is aimed at people who are trying to get their head around Ajax, what it is and what they can do with it. If you already know that, there’s not much for you here.

RR: The 12 chapters in the book were all very exciting to read. Which out these 12 is your favorite and why?

Rebecca: Chapter 7 on the DOM without doubt. The handling of whitespace is something that every other book or web site I looked at danced around instead of tackling head on. One author actually admitted that he had re-written his exercises to eliminate the problem. It turns out not to be a big deal, but I’m kinda proud of myself for resolving it..

RR: Chapter 2 (Designing Ajax Applications: Thinking Ajaxian) is an excellent chapter for readers to start understanding the context and applicability of Ajax. If you were to summarize the key message from that chapter for our readers, what would that be?

Rebecca: “Ajax isn’t a language or a platform, it’s a way of thinking about Web apps so that you can reduce round trips to the server and thereby improve the user experience.”

RR: One of the most important aspects of JavaScript programming for the web is DOM Scripting. In your book, although you cover this topic fairly comprehensively, you never talk about the exhaustive functionality that libraries like Prototype, jQuery, Dojo or any other provide to make the task of DOM scripting extremely simple and powerful. Why has your book preferred to ignore these real options?

Rebecca: We made the decision early on in the writing process that the focus of the book would be on the concepts and the underpinnings. My theory is that if you understand what’s actually happening with DOM scripting, libraries like Prototype and Dojo come as a great relief. If you don’t, they become slightly-scary magic boxes. You can’t push them, because you don’t really know what they’re doing. There’s also a practical matter–there are so many good frameworks on the market, it just wouldn’t be feasible to cover them all, and to pick one would be an implicit endorsement.

Head First Ajax

RR: There are a couple of chapter that discuss XML and JSON based data interchange. How do you compare the two formats and which one do you prefer and why?

Rebecca: I come from an object-oriented background, so JSON seems more natural to me, but that’s very much personal prejudice.

RR: I really like the subtitle of the chapter on “Post Requests” — “Paranoia: Its’ Your Friend”. The take on “Post Requests” is from the perspective of information security. Would it have made sense to add additional bits of Ajax Security, including cookie re-validation, secure protocols and authentication schemes in the chapter?

Rebecca: Yes, it would have made sense, and I would have liked to have discussed security more generally. But Internet security is, as I’m sure you know, a HUGE topic. My theory is that it’s better to not do something at all than to do it badly, and given the constraints of this book, I could not have done a respectable job of it.

RR: Coming back to the book as a whole. If you were given the 60 seconds pitch to convince our readers to get hold of the book. What would that be?

Rebecca: Oh, I’m terrible at this sort of thing–it’s one of many reasons I write books instead of press releases!  But I’d say that HF Ajax, like all the HF books, is far more accessible than the average tutorial, without sacrificing depth of coverage. You won’t simply memorize some syntax or a set of arbitrary techniques that the author thought typical; you’ll really understand the concepts and be able to apply them to your own work.

RR: Thanks for writing a great book and thanks for speaking to us today. Before you go would you like to share your contact information or your publicly available tech musings URL so that interested readers could reach out to you.

Rebecca: I don’t maintain a web site (I’d like you to believe I’m too busy, but the truth is probably closer to “lazy”!), but there’s a forum for the book at HeadFirstLabs.com.

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