When Ronald Huereca sent me an email a few weeks back asking me to review his eBook, “WordPress & AJAX“, I was a bit hesitant. I’m not a fan of scripting languages and I know little to nothing about writing JS from scratch. However, I thought that it would be a great learning experience and I never like to turn down dev books that I can share with you guys.
WordPress & AJAX goes for $24, is in PDF format and has 252 pages. Ronald offers lifetime upgrades for the book as well. The book is divided into 15 easy to read chapters that walk you through 3 different AJAX examples. I was also impressed on how he took a chapter to talk about formatting and best practices.
I give the book 4 out of 5 stars. It was well-written in an easy to understand laid back style with a few nerdy jokes. I don’t give it a full five stars because the beginning starts out a bit awkward, but mostly because I didn’t understand a lot of it. However, since I’m well-versed in WordPress PHP, I was able to understand enough of it to make it through the samples.
Chapters
- 1. What is AJAX?
- 2. Adding Scripts Properly to WordPress
- 3. Localizing Your Scripts
- 4. Properly Formatting jQuery for WordPress Use
- 5. Preventing Plugins From Loading
- 6. Sending Our First AJAX Request
- 7. Server-Side Security for AJAX
- 8. Server-Side Processing of AJAX Requests
- 9. Server-Side Responses of AJAX Requests
- 10. Client-Side Processing/Parsing
- 11. The Output
- 12. Example #1 WP Grins Lite
- 13. Example #2 Static Random Posts
- 14. Example #3 Dynamic PayPal Buy Now Options With Coupon Code
- 15. Reduce Your Javascript Footprint
Worth Buying?
This book is worth purchasing if you have an interest in both AJAX and WordPress. Even if you’re well-versed in AJAX, this book is great about showing you how to make your AJAX an actual plugin. If you’re not well-versed in AJAX, but know at least a little bit of JS, you can easily pick this book up.