Ajax - Web 2.0 Primer course.

So last week I went on a four day course to find out more about using Ajax to make web2.0 sites. The course was actually 2x4 day courses attempted to be fitted in to 1x4 day course.

For me, the first course was pretty simple, it was supposedly the prerequisite course fro the Ajax primer. We covered the Javascript basics, but in order to move on, the course instructor assumed our knowledge of HTML and css. For me this was OK, but some people didn't seem too up with the whole css selector specs instead of using inline markup. However, this did 'get' us through the course in a day.

We then jumped to the Ajax course. As I have blogged before, earlier this year I bought Pragmatic Ajax: A web2.0 primer (www.pragprog.com). Most of the second course was actually summed up in this book (although I did learn more about some Best Practices). We went through from making an xhr object that is cross-browser compatible, to starting our own library, and then we did some examples using jQuery, Prototype and Scriptaculous.

The course was from Learning Tree, and the instructor was very knowledgable, showing us some other books that we might want to read, primarily Douglas Crockford - Javascript, The best bits (www.oreilly.com) and John Resig - Pro Javascript Techniques (apress).

The thing that interested me the most was probably something that had the least time spent on it. For my toy app, YADB, I wanted to be able to drag and drop cards from either a card list or inventory list into a deck container. We were shown how to do this using Scriptaculous (quite fortunate, considering YADB is Ruby on Rails).

Work wise, it was good to be shown exactly how to look at blackboxing functions, and how to pass JSON and objects around.

Two disappointing features of the course - example code snippets did not follow what 'Best Practices Guy' was saying, sometimes even in the same slide, and some of the exercises on the computer didn't match the code in the book.

Also, no fault of the instructor, but somewhere along the line, they hadn't explained to Learning Tree that most people on my site primarily use Perl,
so some of us were a bit stuck when it came to modifying some of the server side code, as we had little/no experience of the 3 they had chosen (jsp, php and .net)

Overall, a good course, that could have been better, but worth going on.

I must contact Learning Tree though about doing the 2 module tests for them though.

An aside to this, why is everything PHP. I had a couple of email links come though about web app jobs coming up, and everyone wants PHP. I could be a bit biased, but certainly a lot of people I know think that PHP is probably one of the worst technologies to come along for a while. Certainly one thing that has been blogged on Perl Buzz is that you can't bug report anything from an older version than the current release, which seems a bit pointless to me. However, I am not going to go into it now, I think I just clearly need to learn it. Better hit the bookshelves!