So far this book is among the few titles on the subject of Microsoft AJAX Library. It is has something for those who have barely any experience with Microsoft AJAX, as well as for seasoned ASP.NET developers. Most books fail when they address such a broad audience, but given the narrow, specialized topic, this book performs just fine.

Chapter 1: the book starts out, as most of them do, with a basic "teaser" sample or raw AJAX (i.e. the manual way of placing AJAX callbacks).

Chapter 2 covers the "foundations", such as JavaScript, DOM, CSS–-the basic of basics.

Chapter 3 is a quick overview of JavaScript object "orientedness", anonymous functions, closures, classes, pseudo-inheritance, etc. It's a very high-level overview, so if you're new to client-side development, you need to read up on JavaScript (may I suggest The JavaScript Anthology, DOM Scripting, or David Flanagan's immortal JavaScript: The Definitive Guide?)

The rest of the book the fun stuff!

Chapter 4 demonstrates and explains in detail how to place raw Ajax + HttpHandler calls without the server control abstraction. Not that you'd want to try this at home, but it doesn't hurt to see how the plumbing works.

Chapter 5 is all about writing classes, interfaces, enumerations; wiring properties and events. Since JavaScript is such a loose language, these concepts mimic their counterparts in the .NET Framework and are more like guidelines, rather than the Pirate Code.

Chapter 6 shows how to write components, behaviors and client controls and highlights their similarities and differences. I picked up a couple of interesting tips here that I haven't seen in documentation. Client page life cycle events are listed too, and I happen to have a cheat sheet for your perusal.

Chapter 7 walks you through creating quite a real-life example of a non-visual timer component and an auto-suggest behavior sitting on top of a text field. This is where all the theory is put to use.

Chapter 8 is an overview of debugging capabilities built into the MS AJAX Library, as well as some browser extensions you can employ for debugging.

Last but not least, Appendix A is a concise library reference.

No book is perfect. If you have an early print, Chapter 4 has some screenshots messed up. They should be renumbered as follows:

4.6 -> 4.8

4.7 -> 4.6

4.8 -> 4.7

On pages 204–207 there's a giant array of first names for the auto-suggest sample. Now, nobody in the right frame of mind will type four pages of names! C'mon, make it downloadable and let's not waste trees. :)

Proofreading could be done better. There's really no "choosed" in English, among other things.

Other than that, this is a very helpful book! It's nice to have the official documentation distilled into a handy reference and accompanied by examples and explanations.

Fonts are sturdy and easy to read, and I love Packt's colorful covers.

Packt kindly provided this book for free as a review copy. Otherwise I'd have to think twice because Packt books are a bitsy expensive.