We'll use a variety of resources for this course, and it will be possible to find everything you need online with various links I'll provide and Google.
While no book is required, if you feel compelled to find yourself a good desk resource or two, here are some books that I've found helpful or that my students have liked.
by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith, Peachpit Press
ISBN (6th edition) 0-321-56408-1
Retail: $34.99
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My students have generally liked books in this Visual Quickstart series from Peachpit Press. The are a lot more "hands on, tutorial" than most other books. While I generally prefer reference-like books over tutorials because I use them more in the long term, I find that the Quickstart books usually have a pretty good set of appendices for reference, and for "tutorial" books they are usually better than most for looking things up. I do tend to keep these around my desk when working on related projects.
by Phil Ballard, SAMS Publishing
ISBN: 0-672-32868-2
Retail: $19.99
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I also really like the SAMS "in 10 minutes", "in 24 hours", etc. series of books. I've always had good luck with these for courses and have had good student feedback about them. I like also that they are priced very reasonably. The "10 minutes" books can be had for $10-15, and they have a surprisingly good, concise, and easy to find quantity of useful information.
Surprisingly, I've found this to be one of the better AJAX books out there. The premise of AJAX isn't that complex, and a lot of AJAX books I've reviewed make it much more complicated than it needs to be.
by Christian Wenz, Developers Library
ISBN 0-672-32880-1
Retail: $19.99
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This little paperback-size book has migrated onto my desk recently. It's not a reference on the Javascript language itself. Instead it's a very useful "how to do things" book with hundreds of short sections of Javascript code, organized and indexed pretty well. Once you know the basic language syntax, this is a really nice practical "how to" book, and very appropriate for this particular programming language.
by Phil Ballard, SAMS Publishing
ISBN: 0-672-32960-3
Retail: $39.99
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This is a book and CD set. The book is not much larger than the AJAX in 10 Minutes book, and surprise! It's written by the same author. It happens to be the other "AJAX is simple" book that I've preferred over most of the other AJAX books I've seen. Unfortunately, the CD that came with the book has migrated somewhere away from my desk and bookshelf, so I can't tell you much about its quality and why this is worth $25 more than "10 Minutes". It says on the sleeve that among other things the CD contains "more than 1,000 pages of how-to's on Ajax, Javascript, HTML, XML, and PHP in searchable PDF format." I hadn't checked out the CD, because that same description can also be applied to Google and the Internet.
The CD also includes an "AJAX programmers toolkit", as do a lot of other AJAX books. I haven't found those to be too useful. I'd rather learn to use AJAX myself, rather than how to use someone else's function library. Learning it directly isn't that complex, and it makes your programming ability much more versatile, IMHO.
by Phil Ballard and Michael Moncur, SAMS Publishing
ISBN: 0-672-32965-4
Retail: $39.99
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On the surface, this seems pretty good because these are the three things we're going to be using in this course (we'll use a little PHP for the server side of the Ajax stuff). But I'm not yet a fan of the "All in One" series from SAMS. Remember, my personal preference is for books that are more reference-oriented. I get the feeling that these "All in One" books are just a set of "10 minutes" books all swirled together, as in mixture of AJAX in 10 Minutes, Javascript in 10 minutes, and PHP in 10 minutes for this one. But rather than just bind the three together, the topics are all intermixed. Maybe it works from a tutorial perspective, in which case many students may like it. But it doesn't work for me as a "look it up" type of book. If you buy this one, let me know what you think at the end of the semester.
by Elizabeth Castro
ISBN 0-321-43084-0
Retail: $34.99
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If you do not have a very solid foundation in strict use of HTML/XHTML and CSS, you will need it for this course. You should have taken CIS 148 (Web Page Markup Language) or you should be concurrently enrolled. This is the recommended book for that course.
by Julie Meloni and Michael Morrison
ISBN 0-672-33097-0
Retail: $34.99
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The new edition of this book was just released in December 2009 and it tracks the contents of CIS 148 very closely. I may use this as the required book for CIS 148 in future semesters.
by John Allsop
ISBN 0-321-64692-4
Retail: $49.99
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This is an alternate recommended book for CIS 148, Web Page Markup Language, and it explains the current philosophy and standards behind web design and development fairly well.