Ajax has swept through the IT world like wild-fire over the last 8 months. It’s being deployed by major corporations across the world to improve the user-experience of their websites (e.g. Google maps, Flickr, Google Suggest and Amazon Discuss). This is only the beginning of its potential. It seems likely that within the year Ajax techniques will become one of the corner stones of contemporary web development. No website will want to be without them and no web designer will want to pass up on these skills.

This book follows on from Apress’ extremely successful Foundations of Ajax title. It takes the reader on a detailed journey through the Ajax technology and shows them how to integrate Ajax with Microsoft’s popular .NET 2.0 Framework to produce their own implementations of the functionality they’re beginning to see on the web. The keystone of the book is practicality. We show people how to put theory into practice and bring Ajax to their web applications in a professional manner.

Crucially, for a book in such a rapidly moving field, we also look ahead to when Microsoft will unveil it’s ‘Atlas’ Ajax toolkit for Visual Studio 2005. We tell people what to expect and how they can begin preparing for it.