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.

Amber Weinberg

Amber is a freelance front-end developer specializing in semantic and accessible custom WordPress themes. She works with agencies and other freelancers to bring their designs to life using custom ACF flexible layout builds - making them more performant and less buggy while allowing the client easy customization without breaking the design system.