Historical errata for Pragmatic Ajax

Just a simple typo. Perhaps you meant to put “being” in place of the first “behind”:

“Because the only thing worse than behind left behind when the train leaves the station is getting on the wrong train.”

The link on this page is broken:
http://www.ajaxian.com/book/ajaxInActionDemo1.html

The link on page 17 is broken:
http://www.ajaxian.com/book/ajaxInActionDemo2.html

[This is in the partial Google Maps extract]. One heading says Firefix, should be Firefox.

Point 3, second sentence: should read “modern browsers trap” rather than “modern browser trap”.

last few words on the page:
“LOOKS like a lot like”
should be
“LOOKS a lot like” or “LOOKS like”

“The web started off as a gopher replacement; a world in which you can simply link between documents in an ad-hoc way.”

1. This is not completely true.
2. gopher should be capitalized, IIRC (Gopher).
3. Many readers won’t know what the Gopher protocol is. I’d suggest reworking this. (I’m old enough and been around long enough to know what archie and veronica are, too.)

line# missing at the very end of paragraph 2. Should read: “In our example, that turns out to be the one defined on line 5.”

“it’s” instead of “its” and “zoom level” instead of “soom level” on page 42:

“In practice, its not quite that simple because the grid coordinates change rather a great deal with each soom level and they often become invalid.”

In the first example on this page you have the line:

xhr.onreadystatechange=processZipData;

“hidden” under xhr.open …

I think it should be completely removed from that example.

beieif should be belief

Did the “// <label=”code.js4.function“/>” slip in from the original markup?

The “synchronous ajax?” section talks about passing false as third argument to xhr.open() to perform call synchronously … yet the example passes true.

Which one is correct then? :-)

My Fair Lady quotation:

you have:
“The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plains.”

should be:
“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain!”

(according to http://www.guntheranderson.com/v/data/theraini.htm and others)

missing something:
“The div on _ will become…”

in the bullet list under “The zoom level”: last word is “riles”, should be “tiles”.

in first sentence: “drve” should be “drive”

SQL “SELECT x WHERE zip LIKE ‘%y’”

should be ‘y%’ to act as a “starts-with” match

missing something in second para, first sentence:
“simple to use version of _ called…”

“riddled with their corpses” is sort of a mixed metaphor - dictionary says “riddled” means “full of holes” but can also mean “fully permeated with” - I think “littered with their corpses” is closer to the intent

two sequential paragraphs start with “Finally”

word repeated: in fourth paragraph after header “Tying It All Together”, first sentence contains “the send function on on line 6”

missing word: end of 5th paragraph reads “register processZipData as callback handler”, should be “as a callback handler”

“lay the lie” is a fairly unusual idiom that sounds awkward here; perhaps “lay that idea to rest” or something else.

List item 4: “User makes subsequent request …” While this is usually technically true, it isn’t always, and it suggests something more explicit than actually happens in most Ajax apps. The user interacts with the page in some way, sure, but it’s the page itself (or JavaScript in it, or the browser, depending on your perspective) that actually makes this subsequent request.

Browser parses return? Seems like a funny way to say it. Try “browser parses result.”

“the Ajax movement” — that word choice bothers me, and not because I don’t like “movements”. It just doesn’t seem quite right for something so grass-roots and spontaneous. “Groundswell” isn’t quite the right word, either. I’ll think on it and try to come up with something else to suggest.

(Dave says: the authors are sticking to their guns with “movement” :)

“You’ll get to see what your favorite development platforms are doing …” — so far, at least, Chapter 5 stops well short of that. Is more planned?

(Dave says: yes)

“thus eliminating the confusion.” — I’m afraid this glosses over some troubling truths. Perhaps change to “thus eventually eliminating the confusion, after 13 years when use of current IE releases finally reaches negligible levels.” :-)

“has some rather severe cross-browser limitations” — you say “some”, but you only list one. And you say “Firstly,” but there’s no “secondly.” (Oh, and Mr. Language Person says: if you do add a second one, please just say “first” instead of “firstly.” :-)

“The Backend” — it’s possible that the reader has been wondering for several pages now whether this would be mentioned. It might be more effective back on p12 with “communicating with the server,” possibly as a sidebar.

“doing XML manipulation of the page” — or DOM manipulation, which doesn’t seem to me to be quite the same thing.

While you’re listing the various gotchas here, you might want to mention the consequences of latency even when you are asynchronous. In this example, it’s possible that the asynch request won’t return until the user has given up and begun filling in those fields manually. If the request returns during this process, or after it, is it appropriate to overwrite what the user has done, or is doing? Applications need to consider that situation and how best to deal with it.

Don’t get me wrong — I love that this chapter is here, and I think the book would be incomplete without it. But many readers will be wanting a quick start on very simple things, and such readers could easily get bogged down here. I would take the opportunity in the first couple of paragraphs to give them permission to skip ahead and save this chapter for later.

“The Real Rocket Science” — I agree with this sidebar, but I think you do the Google developers a disservice by making the interface seem like no big deal. Technically it’s easy, but the conception of this kind of interface is the really amazing part, just having the idea and then realizing that it could be done. So many things are simple once you’ve seen that they’re possible.

Line number references to the source code on this page are broken.

Link to quirksmode.org doesn’t work. It has to be www.quirksmode.org …

www.behavior.com doesn’t seem to work. What about http://bennolan.com/behaviour/ or http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dherman/javascript/behavior/ ?

“Fortunately, there’s an easy fix (but annoying) fix.” ->
“Fortunately, there’s an easy (but annoying) fix.”

Providing some sort of code sample that accomplishes the backend work would be useful here. As it stands, if a reader went through and wanted to actually try these code samples, they’re somewhat out of luck, as only half the demo is actually spelled out at this point.

(Dave says: this is in the new chapters)

This book will be incomplete without a chapter on testing.
Selenium looks promising as a client-side test framework:
http://selenium.thoughtworks.com/index.html

First paragraph of the chapter: “then dynamically updating the web page. ”The" sounds weird. Might be better as “a”.

Second paragraph of the chatper. “crash course of” should be “crash course in”.

“Ajaxian” sounds silly here. Corny.

You’re talking about the audience of the book, what your assumptions are, etc. I’ve already read two chapters. What if I’m not the intended audience?

Feels like this was an author’s first chapter. Breaks the flow.

You say that JavaScript is actually a “very nice” programming language, but you don’t back it up. You’re basically saying, “You may hate JavaScript, but you’re wrong” without any clarification. It would be better to give some objective proof. “Actually JavaScript is a very advanced programming language, with features like closures, continuations, blah blah blah as found in …” Otherwise it sounds empty.

dynamism makes it “dangerous”? Not enough clarification. Maybe even too much of a religious issue. I think you’re wrong. It’s not dangerous. I’m not trying to argue it, but it IS arguable.

Even if you hold to “dangerous”, you need to show why/how in some way or at least allude to the fact that you’re going to demonstrate it later.

With JavaScript’s sordid history of ACTUAL dangerous behaviour (from a security perspective) “dangerous” might be a misleading term here.

Toward the end of the second paragraph, you have a sentence that doesn’t work. Ends with “, but embedded in the displayed page”.

In your “Forgiving Language” sidebar, how is this different from Java, C#, or C? The only example you’ve given is semi-colon. Is that it? The sidebar doesn’t add much.

“Javscript supports four basic types of variables”. You say it correctly later. It should be “values”, not “variables”.

In the code comments at the bottom of the page, you could scratch “myVariable is” from the first two for consistency’s sake.

“and its a very powerful feature.” Typo “its” should be “it’s”. And why is it a powerful feature? Are you going to tell us later?

“It is generally bad form” should be “It is generally considered bad form”

“…but its how the web works…” -> ’’…but it’s how the web works…"

“…CEOs house…” -> “…CEO’s house…”

"Double uh oh

“…about CSS that it ever knew…” -> “…about CSS than it ever knew…”

“With ajaxian techniques…” -> “With Ajaxian techniques…” (for consistency; so far you’ve capitalized every other use of this word).

re: “…the next major release of IE…” — you may want to mention what the current major release is as of this writing, to provide some context when this book is in its fifth printing. :-)

“…if we were try to process…” -> “…if we were to try to process…”

“…we would not have yet received…” -> “…we would not yet have received…”

“…how to register processZipData as callback handler…” -> “…how to register processZipData as a callback handler…”

At the bottom of the page, you refer to the “properties” onreadystatechange( ) and onresponsereceived( ) in the text, but the parentheses make them look like function calls. Also, in the code example onreadystatechange doesn’t have the parentheses. You may want to revisit this section and make the references consistent.

Pretty much everywhere else in the book you use “JavaScript”, but in this chapter it’s mostly (maybe all) “Javascript”. You may want to standardize.

“…its not an error…” -> “…it’s not an error…”

“…they can take one or more parameters…” -> “…they can take zero or more parameters…”

“…no, its not.” -> “…no, it’s not.”

There is a discussion and link to quirksmode.org; this domain is a german site that is redirected to a hosting company (in other words, not a list of browser issues).

reference to chapter & page for libraries discussion is missing (??)

Page number for important events section is missing

Generally speaking, the important states are 4 (Completed), and anything else. —>

Generally speaking, the most important state is 4 (Completed).

“And its that interface that” -> “And it’s that interface that”

“Technically” and “conception” should be bold?

the URL of the screenshot does not wordwrap in the paragraph (it goes out of the page)

(Dave says: these things are fixed in the final step of the production)

url to ajaxianmaps website is non clickable in pdf

“The stripPx()1 function” -> “The stripPx() function”

The example url (amaps/XXX.html) does not work.

“As with tileSize(), we’ll declare as viewportWidth and viewportHeight as” -> “As with tileSize, we’ll declare both viewportWidth and viewportHeight as”

“from the index of the tiles to in the” -> “from the index of the tiles in the”

urls run out of screen/page

(Dave says: layout issues are addressed at the end of the production process)

innerHTML Property: Sets or retrieves the HTML between the start and end tags of the object.

String that specifies or receives the content between the start and end tags.

The property is read/write for all objects except the following, for which it is read-only: COL, COLGROUP, FRAMESET, HTML, STYLE, TABLE, TBODY, TFOOT, THEAD, TITLE, TR.

Summation: You can’t write to a <TR…> via Ajax in IE, works great everywhere else though.

If the background request takes to[o] long to return… (2nd p. of the Network Latency section)

Substract —> Subtract

Reformate —> Reformat

first heading on page: “Firefix” instead of “Firefox”

“And its that interface that we find easy…” -> “And it’s that interface that we find easy…”

Link works for me. The example-application doesn’t though. After a good long wait city is filled with: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN”>

And state is filled: undefined

Googles —> Google’s

If the background request takes to long to return,

Should be:
If the background request takes too long to return,

“see how long you go before having to turn in back on again.”

Should be “turn it back on again”.

In the IFrames info panel, perhaps you should add a quick mention that the other down-side of using an IFrame is the incessant “click” when using a browser like IE. In some cases, this can be a killer.

The website for the demo doesn’t work.

In Firefox …

City is filled in with: Mission ViejoCA

State is filled in with: undefined

So I tried in IE. Doesn’t work at all.

I’m sure it’s simple. :)

www.behaviour.com on the reference brings up ADHD information - think the link might be wrong - please pass on the correct link to the email address. Thx.

I’m looking forward to (hopefully) coming chapter dealing with the server side of this. The two (2) Java examples don’t really cut it for me. At the very least I’d expect some “hello world” examples in various serverside languages.

(Dave says: these are coming. I just uploaded a new version containing PHP support. Expect to see Rails and .NET soon)

You already used the user-rabbit analogy. Once is fun. Twice is well… not.

typo on line 5: ‘those features, then in makes …’ should be ‘those features, then it makes …’

The URL at the bottom of the page runs off the right side.
http://www.ajaxian.com/book/ajaxInActio

Is all that is visible.

The last sentence on the page:

by tage, and a vari-

URL to http://www.ajaxian.com/pragajax/ajaxianmaps appears to be broken: 404

I’m not sure if it’s the case for all URLs in the PDF, but so far each URL that is supposed to point to an example or artifact (image, html file, etc) has been broken. The URLs for the pushpin images on this page are an example: 404

asdfasdf - some kind of tag, or Just goofin’ around?

Probably a tag, but the ‘?? on page ??’ are throughout the early part of the book.

request takes to long -> too long

one defined on line_. -> line reference missing (another ??)
string, and boolen) -> boolean

I loved this one! crufty -> crafty, crusty? Or just leave it and invent a new word?

The next several chapters… -> Creating Google Maps intervenes, then the chapters on frameworks begin…

References to the www.ajaxian.com/pragagax are broken? -> reference book source?

the div on -> head scratcher…

fix (but annoying) fix -> found this awkward (almost didn’t bring this up)

display it correct -> correctly

reformate -> again points for creativity! but maybe not intended?

build degradeable user -> backwards compatible?

reuse these function -> functions. ?

(Authors say: fixed what we can—part of this is a quote)

handles request -> requests ?

way with think -> way we think?

by tage -> by tags ?

than have the rendered -> the

Avanced -> Advanced (heading)

Whereas of those -> Whereas those ?

turn in back on -> a subliminal suggestion to sleep?

And last but not least:
customers to user our -> use our

doing, they we should -> we should

I really enjoy this book. Please keep up the great work! I eagerly await the further adventures…

In general, this book feels less well put together than the RoR and pickaxe books. The general feel is too bouncy and unfocused: we start with a page of a CRM, put some light Ajaxing, detour into an impressive but mostly irrelevant reproduction of Google Maps (irrelevant because there is no XHR use — it’s mainly a sophisticated use of JS, not Ajax). Then a light tour through some frameworks, some UI considerations (and then the unwritten rest of the book).

It would be much better to stick to one topic. Is this a book about advanced JS including Ajax? Then write that book, using an extended example.

Is it a book on the ins and outs of Ajax itself? Write that book, and teach how to create a toolkit, demonstrating all the low level details.

Is it a book on using Prototype and Dojo? Write that book, again, with an extended example.

Being all things to all people may seem attractive when the Ajax space is so chaotic, but it isn’t going to help either the beginning practitioner or the advanced user much at all. I’m left, after reading this book, no richer in knowledge than I was before. Narrow the topic and go deeper. Make the front part of the book a sustained tutorial (as works so successfully with the Ruby and RoR books).

As it stands, I have buyers remorse, after getting two very strong books previously from PragProg.

(Dave says: remember you’re looking at a book in its early stages. It will get knitted together as it progresses)

on this page the code is split on two pages (not useful, specially for a small exable), on top of that there is a box in the middle.

For readabilety I suggest to changes this

(Dave says: all layout issues get resolved just before we go to the printers)

The linke after “So, for all you Internet Explorer 5.0+ users,” is broken/incomplete

Note that we haven

Illustrating innerHtml, outerHtml and innerText with simple examples would be even more beneficial.

States section: It could be great if you can give some usage examples for other state values (0, 1, 2, 3)…if not here then somewhere else in the book

There seems to be inconsistent treatment of words like XMLHTTPrequest and innerHTMl — sometimes they are set in constant-width font and sometimes not.

Capitalization is inconsistent on sections and subsections.

“have looked really” => “would have looked really”

“display it correct.” -> “display it correctly.”

Prototype is mentioned quite often in the text, but it does not appear in figure 5.1.

“these function.” -> “these functions.”

“Googles” -> “Google’s”

FWIW, I found the parenthetical phrase at the end of the first paragraph very awkward reading.

Strike the word “popular”.

“uppdater” -> “updater”

“full-fledged rich” -> “full-fledged, rich”

“Lewinski and Razorfish” -> “Lewinski, and Razorfish”

“now” -> “2005”

“much greater common ground to work with.” made for awkward reading.

“ifram” -> “iframe”

“en toto”?

parent.parent?

“treaing” -> “treating”

Have a side bar which explains metaprogramming

(Dave says: the authors feel this would detract from the discussion)

“Ajaxian goodness” -> “Ajaxian effects”

“object oriented libraries” -> “object-oriented libraries”

“conventient” -> “convenient”

“tage” -> “tag”

“modulation and general mucking” -> “modulation, and general mucking”

“\\”Ajax Frameworks\\" chapter" -> “Ajax Frameworks chapter”

“$() can” — the font of $() is not correct?

“who feature” -> “who contain”

“bolded” -> “emboldened”, “bold”, or “boldfaced”

’none -> none

“already visible list” -> “already-visible list”

If the background request takes to long to return (too)

and its this gradient transparency support (it’s—you have a possessive where you need a contraction)

We start out on line 8 by creating a empty map (an)

If so, we know that its a currently visible tile (it’s—you have a possessive, but need a contraction)

If not, the img is no longer visible (image)

At the bottom of the page: “In JavaScript, its not an error at all” — “its” should be “it’s”.

“While Firefox, Safari, and other browsers provide native support for PNGs with alpha transparency, IE 6 does not. ” It seems to me you might want to front load this so that readers following along using IE can have the solution before wondering why it looks so bad. Tell the reader before doing the png stuff about the IE solution.

Regarding the IE/PNG stuff: or at least give them a heads-up early on that you’ll have a soltuion.

“Feel free to use the code from this chapter to implement your own Google Maps inter face for your own projects, …” This sentence is awkward and runs on a bit.

It is a full featured toolkit that has many packages including: (… packages, including—add a comma)

With this simple abstraction, we will be able to use any remoting solu-
tion and reuse these function. (these functions—make plural)

At the bottom of the page is " In your callback you get access to: ". The next page states with a big grey note followed by the bullet items. It interrupts the flow.

(Dave says: We’ll address this during the layout stage)

“The error key handles errors, whereas load handles request that went through nicely. ” (a request) But how about, “The error key handles errors, whereas load handles a successful request.”

“We can get rid of the assignCityState( ) call itself, and there is no need for a load( ) function, as that is taken care of due to the fact that Dojo will automatically load a JavaScript result from the server if we tell it via the mimetype text/javascript:”

How about, “We can get rid of the assignCityState( ) call itself, and there is no need for a load( ) function, as Dojo will automatically load a JavaScript result from the server if we declare the mimetype to be text/javascript:”

“Dojo can to submit a form asynchronously for you as well as accessing a given URL.” ( remove “to”, change “accessing” to “access”, “for you” seems extraneous)

“Ruby on Rails favors the technique of having HTML returned from the server”

could be: “Ruby on Rails favors the technique of returning HTML from the server”

The paragraph starting with “The trick is that you need to make sure the content…” begins with second person voice (“you”) and then shifts to first person plural voice (“we”). It should be consistent.

I’m getting a little confused by “inner” and “outer” div.

As I’m understanding it, the inner div is really the tiled landscape, and the outer div is a smaller view of it. Perhaps this would be better terminology?

Top of page: getVisibleTiles()()

I’ve noticed a little inconsistency here and there with code font for method names and whether the include or omit the parens.

Perhaps you could show and example of the mapx, mapy, tilesize numbers used to compute startx, starty, tilesx, tilesy … along with an updated version of figure 4.6 showing the numbers.

Dave says: the authors feel that this would detract from the main point of the discussion)

Coding style; I prefer in JavaScript to declare each variable, so I would have written

for (var x = …
for (var y = …

The text “sajax_do_call(”get_city_state“, x_get_city_state.argume” is chopped off and extends off the RIGHT side of the page. (oops..)

The text in the box at the top:

“PHP Fatal error: Only variables can be passed by reference in /path/to/najax/classes/Seria”

is cut off and extends off the side of the page.

(Dave says: this gets fixed prior to printing)

The text “http://www.ajaxian.com/book/ajaxInActio” runs off the right side of the page.

(Dave says: layout issues are fixed prior to printing)

The code runs off to the right of the page.

I’m using Mac OS X, 10.4, and viewing it in Preview.

(Dave says: This gets fixed prior to printing)

“C’est toute” should be “C’est tout”

“Coldfusion” should be “ColdFusion”

In the text of the paragraph under “Migrating to Sajax,” “ZipService.sajax.php” starts with a capital Z. But on page 146 and in the code on p.148, it’s lowercase z: zipService.sajax.php

In the network latency setion, a suggestion of how the UI issues you mention should be handled would be really helpful (or even just guidelines on how to handle these problems). If the answers will be covered later in the book, a statement that this will be covered in section ?? on page ?? would be useful.

The Chapter : Ajax Explains goes over the basics of Javascript and Async XML operations. Very well explained. The problem is it goes directly to comparatively complex implementation of google maps (Cool but not your typical Web Application for most development env).
Some good examples are really missing between these 2 chapter, using AJAX one-on-one(Dynamically updating lists, menu based interface, other typical Enterprise apps). No Framework. Remember, most implementations are not using any frameworks currently. They need to mature first for adoption.

Hope this helps.
http://theyogi.blogspot.com

(Dave says: this is addressed by the new chapters)

XOAD events which and allows - ‘which ? and’ or ‘which allows’?

This url does not show anything http://www.ajaxian.com/pragajax/ajaxianmaps/ as well as pragajax/code/amaps/images/dialog.png

in the The Real Rocket Science block - last paragraph “conception Fof” I’m guessing should just say “conception of”

This might have been fixed already, but there is a typo in the excerpt PDF available from the website. The title of this segment has ‘Firefix’ instead of ‘Firefox’

Page 44:

IE 6, Firefix 1.x, and Safari 2.x Only
We�ve tested this version of Ajaxian Maps in the three major browsers, but haven�t bothered with older versions and more obscure browsers (sorry, Opera users). It should work on older platforms, but without testing, we can�t be sure we�ve caught everything.

Have you considered discussing usage of AJAX with ColdFusion in the book?

(The authors probably won’t include ColdFusion in the book)

Looks like “falseXMLHttpRequest” is run together in “When you call the open function, if you
pass a third argument of falseXMLHttpRequest will make its request”

“If the typo had occured”: I believe it should be “occurred”

No line number given in
“What do you suppose the value of myResult on line is?”

“Ahh, finally�something�s that easy to write! The de facto standard innerHTML property allows you to change the contents of an element by…”

I use the innerHTML attribute myself occatioanlly, but to call it an “de facto standard” is just wrong!

I think you will get a very large part of the JS community set against you, since the use of the MS propietary innerHTML is very controverial.

Just my 2 cents…

—
Dag.

Code example for “File 4” has text cut off on the right side of the page.

not sure if I screwed this up, but while implementing the maps code I noticed the initial display is the zoomed version and the zoom button actually zooms out…maybe intended, not sure. Also, I had a hell of a time with Batik-1.6, so you may want to elaborate some more on which libs to use, intially there was a complaint from the compiler that setQuality() wasn’t set, this maybe a version of Batik you didn’t test with but beware.

Illustration: “Capital of Spian” instead of “Capitol…” in the Dialog/pushpin graphic.

“bee” should be “be” in the last full paragraph on page 131.

…it wouldn�t bee too much of a stretch…

I like the points you’re making here, about good OO programing, and good and bad ways of navigating the DOM. But there’s a lot of text here. How about a side by side example of good and bad JavaScript?

How about a quick example here of good and bad (or new and old) ways of navigating the DOM?

Dave says: the authors suggest this was already covered in the javascript chapters)

When used on a table, Insertion.Bottom throws a javascript error in IE. Maybe a warning here about unpredictable results when serving html markup via Ajax?

How about a blurb on using ajax with Rails? Some things to note:
-Stylesheet info does not get passed to html rendered using render(:partial)
-The age of browser incompatability isn’t over yet.
-Normaly in Rails you can store partial content in shared/, but with the form_remote_tag this causes problems.

A chapter on unit testing ajax code will round this book out nicely. (I’ve already fixed the same ajax bug 3 times on my latest project) In Rails, the assert_tag method is great for verifying existence and content of DOM elements.

contigously => contiguously

“… not quite powerful enough…” -> “…not powerful enough…”

zoom.png URL runs out of the page

pushpin.png URL runs out of the page

“(like Scriptaculous, for example)” -> “Scriptaculous” more often is written as “Script.aculo.us” - even on the same page. Better to always use “Script.aculo.us”

“Scriptaculous”->“Script.aculo.us”

Up until this point the second PHP framework was refered to only as Najax, now it is billed as XOAD in the 9.3 section header and introductory paragraphs. This is potentially rather confusing.

“The whole affect can be achieved” should be “The whole effect can be achieved”.

First, I’m using Firefox 1.0.7. So it is a Mozilla 1.0+ browser. When you go to the link: http://www.ajaxian.com/book/ajaxInActionDemo1.html
and try it out the following is put into the City field, ChicagoIL and “undefined” is entered into the state field.

This really isn’t specific to one page, but to this chapter (Creating Google Maps) in general. I think I see where the ‘A’ in Ajax is used (i.e. dynamically creating the image tags), but it’s not as obvious as in earlier examples where XMLHttpRequest is used. I think it would be helpful to at least summarize where the different components of Ajax are used. For me, seeing the concept of the asynchronous part was the most difficult because I had a preconceived notion (put there by the earlier chapters) that XMLHttpRequest needed to be used.

(Dave says: this chapter is really to do with creating dynamic, responsive web applications. It explains early on that it isn’t full Ajax)

Reading the ‘JavaScript in a Web Page’ box, there doesn’t
seem to be a need to get negative and have the code say
‘Jerk!’ Something more friendly would be nice, such as
‘Hello there!’.

In the sentence ‘This feature is often referred to as a
closure’, I’ve never heard another name to describe it.
Why not just say ‘This feature is referred to as a closure’.

In the sentence ‘If you give an element an id= attribute, you
can then retrieve that element using a special function…’
What makes this function special? For somebody who codes in
this stuff, there doesn’t seem to be anything special about
it. How about just dropping the word ‘special’?

Regards,
Blair

In the paragraph starting with “So while there’s no doubt…”, there’s
this statement “we’re pretty sure they weren’t involved in the
creation of the Google Maps interface.”

I recall seeing an interview on Slashdot on the person
who lead the team that developed Google Maps, so we know
who did the work and the book can acknowledge them.

I think it would be nice to acknowledge the person/people
who did the work initially to get Google Maps to the world.

Regards,
Blair

In the processMove() function, the top and left values are given to
parseFloat() before used:

innerDiv.style.top = parseFloat(top) + (event.clientY - dragStartTop);

Every time top and left are set, they are set from stripPx(), which
already does ‘return parseFloat(…)’. is there any reason why there
is an extra parseFloat() in processMove()?

I could see the the book either explain this or remove the extra
parseFloat() call.

Regards,
Blair

At the bottom of the page, this appears

getVisibileTiles()()

Blair

Could the book explain why checkTiles() is called in processMove()
instead of just doing the clean up for all the tiles in stopMove()?
It seems that from a performance point of view, it would be better to
do the clean up of tiles after the move has been completed in
stopMove(). After the move has been completed, presumably the browser
is not doing anything, as the user as released the mouse button, and
this would be the perfect time to clean up.

Could the book also show how much performance improvement there would
be from moving checkTiles() from processMove() to stopMove()?

(Dave says: the authors say that these kinds of discussion are probably beyond the scope of this book)

In the second to last paragraph, there’s this sentence:

“Because we want to put our zoom widget above the tile
images, we’ll need to set the z-index of the inner div to
0.”

Since we’re explicitly listing the inner div’s z-index here,
could the paragraph complete by saying something like.
“And the z-index of the widget to 1.” This is in the
code, but saying it here would add some clarity.

Regards,
Blair

Extra set of parentheses after alert(), third line of last paragraph on the page.

Section header: “library” should be capitalized?

http://www.ajaxian.com/book/ajaxInActionDemo1.html ain’t working.

After I type the zip and leave the text box, the city box is filled with “SeattleWA” and the state field contains “undefined”.

On the first line of text after the source code, it says, “value of myResult on line is?”. It should be, “value of myResult on line 9 is?”.

On the first line of the page it says, “that turns out to be the one defined on line .”. It should say “that turns out to be the one defined on line 5.”.

In the second paragraph, second line, it starts off with, “starting on on page ??;”.
The word “on” should not be repeated and the page number should be filled in. I did a quick scan of the book and I could not find a table of important events, which is probably why the page number isn’t correct.

In the inset for “The Real Rocket Science”, in the third paragraph, second line, you have, “but the conception Fof this kind …”. All the f’s in “of” should occur at the end of the word and there is on one f.

In the paragraph after the HTML code, second line, you have, “The div on will become what …”. I am assuming there is supposed to be a line number after the word “on”.

The line containig the text below is slightly longer than all the other lines on that page. (A minor thing, granted, but sloppy :-).

Action methods have access to a number of state management resources,

URLs don’t wrap. This is a general problem also observed on pages 203 and 205.

On page 206 the link to the Mozilla JavaScript debugger extends off the right hand side of the page.

<%= javascript_include_tag ‘prototype’, ‘effects’, ‘controls’, ‘effects’ %>

can be replaced with

<%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>

On the last line of the page you have, “function that we referenced on line .” You need to have a line number before the period and the source snipit above it should have line numbers.

Secondy, I’m using Safari and am having the same problem with p://www.ajaxian.com/book/ajaxInActionDemo1.html dumping the entire XML into the City and undefined into the State

The link goes no where.

It’d be nice to have the other types of values a variable can be (a call out? a reference to a later chapter or appendix?)

At the top of the page, in the “Generic Handle” grey box, there is a sentence that reads “This when you use the parameter”. Shouldn’t the name of the parameter appear in between “the” and “parameter”? It’s somewhat confusing, or at least it was to me.

I really like your Google Maps example! Still, a detail I found unsatisfying is that you can drag to outside of the map area, into “image not found” territory.

Here’s a version of the page that does not let the user drag outside the map area:
http://www.gaborcselle.com/download/step7-2.html

Very few changes were needed - I described them at the top of the source.

Another alternative to solve this problem would be to let the user drag anywhere, but have the server always return a blank image outside the area for which there are tiles (e.g. through mod_rewrite trickery).

— Gabor Cselle

Header and footer text including page numbers is not legible when printed on my HP Laserjet 4100 due to low contrast of with the blue bars in the background.

(Dave says: the beta books aren’t really designed for printing, so there will be some issues like this)

The figure with this text cuts off the code example between the end of page 88 ansd the beginning of page 89:

Transport Enforcement:
Sometimes, we don’t want graceful, transparent failover. If, for some reason, we must mandate that only certainly kinds of post-back transport mechanisms be used…

(Dave says: we’ll deal with this during the layout process)

The figure named:

Transport Enforcement:
Sometimes, we don’t want graceful, transparent failover. If, for some reason, we must mandate that only certainly kinds of post-back transport mechanisms be used…

certainly kinds should be CERTAIN kinds

8.1: choose for integration Ajax

we suggest XXX

of various quality and richness
“Ajax.” => “Ajax”. (picky, picky…)

end of page: passed between tier (like => tiers?

readystate => ready state? (this struck me as wrong, but it may actually be exactly what you intended…)

JEE => J2EE

user can hit enter orreturn => or return

end of page: , the easy your life is.

Great work folks!!!!!!!!!!! That debugging chapter fairly rocks!

in the code for the animation - you’re missing a ‘e’ at the end of the Line curve

As you fire of XHR requests you lose hair wondering why the same item keeps coming back, and you only see one hit on the server side.

‘of’ should be ‘off’

i-; // compensate for live nodelist

that’d be “i—;” (on both pages 63 (end of code) and 76 (top)).

Under “Advanced Capabilities”, ‘capapbilities’ should be ‘capabilities’

Section 13.3 - 2 typos - paragraph 1 - “You need define…” should be “You need to define…” - paragraph 4 - “They key is understanding…” should be “The key is understanding…”

your’re => you’re, borwser => browser:
However, if the file your’re fetching contains HTML, it’ll
probably get rendered by your borwser.

Seems a little redundant:

For the sake of conversation, let’s assume that
the map is displayed with just 256 colors, meaning each pixel would consume just one byte of memory per pixel.

hiearchy => hierarchy:

To compile the code, you’ll need to put the Batik JARs in your classpath, and place the source code in the following directory hiearchy:

degradeable => degradable

With Dojo you can build degradeable user interfaces more easily, prototype interactive widgets quickly, animate transitions, and build Ajax-based requests simply.”

avanced => advanced

Script.aculo.us also provides a series of more avanced techniques, such as Drag And Drop and sorting capapbilities. We’ll examine these in detail in the next chapter.

‘controls’, ‘effects’ => ‘dragdrop’, ‘controls’

To import them all, you use the following construct:
<%= javascript_include_tag ‘prototype’, ‘effects’, ’controls’, ’effects’ %>

For the PDF readers, it would be handy if you put the ‘defaults’ command line in the text to make it copy/pastable.

delete extraneous “control”:

You can therefore use the control Control-A key combination to select the entire page and use “View Selection Source” to see something very close to a “Live View Source” option.

Should it also mention Command?

“not” => “no”:

Internet Explorer provides not native mechanism for viewing the live source of a web page.

I think I’d prefer “cache-busting” to make the sentence easier to read, rather than the unhyphenated “cache busting”.

Fourth line from the bottom:

the Atlas framework. Fom the decision to overload the expected behav-

should be:

the Atlas framework. F[r]om the decision to overload the expected behav-

The SVGConverter code listed on page 26 (as well as the identical downloadable copy) fails to run with the following error using version 1.6 of Batik here: http://www.apache.org/dist/xml/batik/

Exception in thread “main” java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/batik/transcoder/Transcoder
at org.apache.batik.apps.rasterizer.SVGConverter.(Unknown Source)
at com.ajaxian.amaps.SVGSlicer.main(SVGSlicer.java:17)

s/which/whom/

The URL should have real ampersands (&) in it, not
url-encoded ones (&)

The code for the Ajaxian Map consistently utilizes the following line in the checkTiles() function:

i-; // compensate for live nodelist

it should read

i—; // compensate for live nodelist

Last paragraph of the page underneath the html code:

This causes the javasscript function.

Too many s’s in javascript

example offered in link (AjaxInAction/screenAjax1.html) doesn’t process properly.
City receives “<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC ”-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN“>”
Zip receives “undefined”

The text under the “Components” paragraph title that reads:
“a compelling feature for developer who”
should be:
a compelling feature for developers who

developers should be plural

Near the end of the function checkTiles, it states:
“i-; //compensate for live nodelist”

but it should be:
“i—; …”

This single minus after the i will cause a javascript error.

At the bottom of the page is the sentance “Next we’ll compare to a newer player najax”.

After reading the php section it talks about sajax and then xoad. Not sajax and then najax.

First full paragraph. 6th line. (and have been able to for year now).

Year should be plurar. Years.

The holy grail of Rails development is to mimic what is commonly on the web. Aside from Google, one of the best candidates for emulation is the stuff produced by 37 Signals.

They do stuff with Basecamp that I would love to emulate. Is it possible to include some examples in this book detailing how to CRUD with AJAX? For example, I would be very happy to mimic the To-do lists in Basecamp. Much thanks for consideration of this. Hope the request did not come in too late in the publishing cycle.

(Dave says: the authors will consider this for a future edition)

Top of page says “…Drag And Drop and sorting capapbilities. We’ll examine these in detail in the next chapter.”

No mention of either until briefly the conclusion.

“…farther and see how easy the integration helpers make some seriously advanced Ajax functionality, like sortable lists and auto-complete fields.”

Auto complete fields is toched on, but never sorting, in the whole bood as far as I know.

The “Defining Events Outside of HTML” box is getting it’s bottom border cut off

The closing paragraph, section 4.4 Summary the sentence

“After we tackle implementing Google Maps, the next several…”

That makes it sound like Google Maps implementation is yet-to-come, which in fact, we’ve already passed that chapter.

The “autocomplete=‘off’” box seems out of place… maybe should go on the next page instead.

Calling Adobe the creator of Flash sounds wrong to me, even though they do own it now after having bought Macromedia. Perhaps this should be rephrased.

In the “MochiKit Intepreter” paragraph, “this” is misspelled as “thnis.”

In the fifth paragraph on the first page of the acknowledgments, “you’re” should be “your”.

In the last paragraph on the page “your’re” should be replaced by “you’re”.

The URL:
http://rig.vlad1.com/\\protect vladimir/canvas/cdemo1.html

should be:
http://rig.vlad1.com/~vladimir/canvas/cdemo1.html

:)

The sentence “However the use of alert() is in this fashion grows quickly tedious…” has an extra “is” in it.

The code in the processMove function has the following two lines of code:

innerDiv.style.top = top + (event.clientY - dragStartTop);
innerDiv.style.left = left + (event.clientX - dragStartLeft);

They work fine since you’re not using a doctype at the beginning of the file, but if you add a XHTML doctype you get javascript errors. The correct version is this

innerDiv.style.top = top + (event.clientY - dragStartTop) + ‘px’;
innerDiv.style.left = left + (event.clientX - dragStartLeft) + ‘px’;

You’re correctly adding + ‘px’ in other examples so I thought the omission was not intentional.

The URL http://www.ajaxian.com/book/ajaxInActionDemo1.html for viewing the Customer Data screen in action is not working. there is a 404 file not found error.
However, when clicking on the following File2 link http://media.pragprog.com/titles/ajax/code/AjaxInAction/figure_ed_screen_ajax_1.html the page can be viewed, and the city and state fields get filled, but with error messages. Obviously the server-side script has been moved.
It does give the idea of how through Ajax only the required fields are updated.

Keep up the good work!
Oerd

second last paragraph (right after the JS listing), end of first line. after the word “line” seems to be missing a line number

The section on JavaScript debugging tools is good, but omits Firebug, an amazing DOM/XmlHttpRequest debugger plugin for Firefox. Firebug allows you to inspect the live DOM properties of any element, and examine asynchronous requests as they occur.

I have no relationship with the Firebug maintainers, but their plugin has proven absolutely invaluable in troubleshooting AJAX problems.

In the ‘The Real Rocket Science’ sidebar, line 3:
…that normalize a maps features… should be:
…that normalize a map’s features…

It’s good that you recommend declaring javascript variables explicitly with “var.” But I think you should make a stronger case for this. I’m a new js programmer and just the other day wasted quite a bit of time tracking down a bug where I was using “i” as an index variable in a for loop and calling another function which also used i as an index variable. Since I hadn’t declared either with var they were two names for the same variable and this introduced a nasty bug which wasn’t easy to track down. Someone on IRC told me that the implementation of js’ implicit declaration mechanism is undefined (varies from browser to browser). I haven’t bothered to confirm that so take it for what it’s worth (I was testing in Firefox). The bottom line though is that failing to consistently use var to explicitly declare variables in js is just asking for trouble.

Toolkit Resources:
http://dojotoolkit.com does not exist; instead, dojotoolkit.org is the right one.

I see that you are in favor of Ajax frameworks. On comp.lang.javascript people highly respect Matt Cruse’s libraries

http://www.ajaxtoolbox.com/

much smarter and better connected than us

In the second to last paragraph on page 10, the word “straight-forward” should not be hyphenated.

I hesitate to bring this up, after a slightly testy exchange with Dave Thomas on the same issue relating to his Rails book.
(in the paper version) I haven’t found the cross reference between the file numbers (left column “file nn” annotations) and the actual downloaded code files. Is it there (in the paper book) and I’m missing it?
Is it at all possible please to provide an html file with the downloaded software that displays file numbers (“file nn”) and links to the actual downloaded files.
I understand there’s not room in the margin for full file names, but having to cross-reference in a printed list just isn’t very, er, agile!!

(Dave says: this is a different issue in this book: the list is indeed missing, for which I apologize. We’re moving away from the lozenge system as of Rails Recipes, and sacrificing some vertical page space to put the filename inline. I’ll see if it’s possble to put up a cross reference somewhere).

The very last line of the page reads “The browser renders the page as in-memory DOM tree”. Instead, it should read “The browser renders the page as AN in-memory DOM tree”.

• one

• two

• three

shouldn’t it really be:

*

Hi, I have noticed that if you change the cursor style for innerDiv, when you click on some areas of the map, you don’t see the cursor change. Else if you change the outerDiv cursor style, you always see the change. Hope it will be useful :)

Why use the -moz-grab proprietary value when you can use the “move” (and more supported) value?

In the fourth paragraph, it says:“As with tileSize() …” but tileSize is a var, not a method, so there’s no need for the parenthesis.

“The view that gets rendered for the previous controller and action would be /app/views/address/edit.rthml”

should be: “/app/views/address/edit.rhtml”

“dojo.oi 83” should read “dojo.io 83”

JavasSript should be JavaScript

In Justin Gehtland’s bio, the first sentence has the word “writing” misspelled:

“Justin Gehtland has ben writring code…”

Unnecessary colon after period at the end of the second sentence of paragraph titled ‘The Function Type’.

“Functions are in fact a type in JavaScript.: In fact, once you define a function…”

No space after full stop in first sentence of paragraph 3:

“outerHTML( ) is a different beast.innerHTML( ) detaches any and all existing child nodes of the target node,…”

"scientist

The grey ‘outbox’ at the top of this page is intuitively in the wrong place.

At this point, you haven’t demonstrated how to request the data from the server.

This box belongs several pages on.

The outbox at the top of the page should be entitled; ‘Uploading a File without a Form!’ and not ‘Uploading a File without a File!’.

No clue on the Rails chapter. Do I need to download and include something? Do I need to configure IIS or Apache to handle rhtml ? Help!

The js includes in formDwr.html should be:
src=“/dwr/dwr/interface/Validator.js”

not

src=“/dwr/interface/Validator.js”

The link to download the source code is broken. Could someone fix it?

http://media.pragprog.com/titles/ajax/code/ajax-code.zip

The section titled “Decorating for non-Ajax” seems to start halfway through a sentence: “discusses the way that the Ruby…”

See the second full paragraph on page 185:

"Conceptually, the data looks like this:

ADRESSES
DOE, JANE
111 Appian Way
Atlanta
GA
11111"

ADRESSES is misspelled.

In the first paragraph after “Firefox DOM Inspector”, fourth sentence, you have, “Beneath this are all the elements that compromise the DOM tree…”. While I am sure that some malicious elements could compromise the DOM tree, I think the word you wanted to use is “comprise”.

Second last line of page should read

“If you prefer, you can display the logging statements in a separate pop-up window by passing false to createLoggingPane()”

In the book it says “true” instead of “false”.

I can not download this books source code.

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