It’s with great excitement that I’d like to announce the upcoming release of Professional Ajax, Second Edition next month. Due to the tight deadlines we had for the first edition, I simply didn’t have the time to put as much into the book as I had originally planned. I always had it in the back of mind to expand the book in the future, and so we’ve done just that.

One of the main goals of this book was to make it a book that everyone who bought the first edition would want to buy. We didn’t just fix errors and change some wording here or there (you remember this from college, I’m sure). This second edition features:

• Every example updated and verified with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2.0 as well as Opera 9 and Safari.
• Every non-language-specific example available to download in PHP, JSP, and ASP.NET versions.
• Better discussion of cross-browser Ajax issues and limitations.
• Inclusion of alternate Ajax approaches such as using images, cookies, and dynamically creating script nodes.
• A new chapter on managing the stream of requests from your application by building a prioritized request manager.
• A new chapter covering the Ajax capabilities of YUI, jQuery, Prototype.
• A new chapter on Comet and its support across various browsers.
• A new chapter on Ajax mapping APIs, covering Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps.
• A new chapter on ASP.NET Ajax Extensions (Atlas).
• A new chapter on Ajax debugging tools and approaches.

As you can see, there’s a lot of new material in this book, plus every chapter has been reviewed and updated with a specific focus on increasing the security of the solutions. I’m very, very excited about this book and think that everyone is really going to be blown away by some of the topics, especially the chapter on Comet. I hope that even if you already own the first edition, you’ll take a look at this second edition because it really has so much more information (10 chapters in the first edition versus 16 in the second). Happy reading!