Review of WordPress & AJAX by Ronald Huereca
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.
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
Thanks for writing the review, I’ve been looking for decent wordpress books but so far have only found a single one by Wrox, that is actually worth keeping. I will give this one a try as I am currently developing a WordPress plugin and wish to ajaxify it in the future.
I was actually trying to find a good book on wordpress myself. I’m currently building a custom wordpress theme from scratch for a client and I’m integrating quite a bit of jquery and ajax. Despite the fact that my javascript writing could use a bit of improvement, I’ve used a number of third party ajax scripts/plugins but I have to admit I don’t fully understand the inter-workings of all the scripts entirely. I’m looking forward to checking this book out to maybe help shed some light on a few things.
I bought it for 14$ – I’ve just read the beginning which is about wp_enqueue_script. Very useful.