I'm very thankful to Manning for sending me the ebook version of "Ajax in Action" a couple of days before it comes out of press. Having participated in the technical review and proofreading process of this much awaited book, I'm very pleased to announce that the final result is of very high quality. Moreover, it is one of the very first books on Ajax released on the market.

My 9-horseshoes review follows (also available at Javaranch.com):

Over the past months, the Ajax commando has been actively pursuing its little revolution on the web war field petitioning for a richer and more standardized interaction model. Everyday, the commando manages to substantially increase its headcount by enrolling a growing number of frustrated, yet admittedly lucid, web developers who were promised to an unavoidable execrable future.

With "Ajax in Action" finally out of press, the commando will now be able to drastically accelerate its evangelization process. The word is spreading that this book is a tremendously useful field guide specifically written for developers down in the trenches who are waiting for the killer solution that will help them build cutting-edge web applications of unprecedented quality. After showing how to switch from old-fashioned to Ajax web development, the authors present the core techniques underlying Ajax as well as a couple design patterns and how these fit into the Ajax development model. Furthermore, the book also contains a fair amount of tricks and best practices that can be used to considerably enhance the user experience and that teach you how to design Ajax applications with security and performance in mind. The second part of the book is fully dedicated to presenting five hardcore examples (type-ahead suggest, live search, double combo, etc.) whose main goal is to provide developers with ready-to-use off-the-shelf Ajax components that can be seamlessly integrated into any new or existing web application.

Whether you are frustrated by low tech web development or you are willing to discover why the potential of Ajax is greater than the sum of its parts, swallow this 600 pages bible and join the commando now. You won’t regret it!!