AJAX for Dummies: 5 Helpful Tips For Budding Programmers

The first things that you need to do before starting to work with AJAX is that you need to understand what it is. First and foremost, AJAX is not a stand-alone product, instead it is a group of amazing technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Having all of these things and more in one place lets you, the programmer, do a lot more with your web application. AJAX is a technology that truly revolutionized the internet and the credit goes to the possibilities that this fine piece of technology offers.

Now, you may be thinking about what things you can do with AJAX. Although this is encouraging, try not to get too carried away. AJAX may be able to provide many features to you as a programmer, but you need to understand that there are only a number of places where you can use it properly. Always do the required research so that you are aware of the reasons you are implementing AJAX.

It is without any doubt true that working with AJAX by using libraries is a much faster way to start developing. However, it is not recommended for beginners and the reason for that is to understand how everything works, you must learn to work with raw code. The libraries that you use are built using raw code, so that is why you should learn it so that you are able to build your own libraries or manipulate existing libraries according to your liking. This will give you a better understanding of how everything works in AJAX.

After you have fully mastered raw code then you should switch to libraries, preferably JavaScript libraries. The reason for this is that JavaScript works hand-in-hand with AJAX and provides a lot of support. Some of the most popular libraries that you can use are Prototype, MooTools and jQuery. Libraries help you write cleaner code and provide a lot of amazing features. Aside from this, libraries also ensure that the code you write is perfectly compatible with all platforms and browsers.

Using events and call-back functions is an absolute must when you are working with AJAX. It does not matter whether you are using a library or raw code, but make sure that you use functions. When you are making proper use of events then you will have complete control over the UI. Events are used on many occasions, for example, when a request is made to the web application but an error occurred, then you will want to display a special message on such an occasion. This is where events come in handy, they let the programmer choose what to display to the user during a specific time.

As a beginner you can never stop learning, and the best way to do this is to keep on experimenting with what you know. Experimenting is undoubtedly the best way to polish your skills. This is because with experimenting you will be exposed to problems that you might not have encountered during regular programming.