WordPress & Ajax – 2nd Edition Digital Book Review

Follow @besz

Very few books in life cover exactly the thing you want to learn in a format that you know will work for you. The Dummies series books work for some topics, while the Learn in 24 Hrs series work for some other topics. If you want to learn WordPress and Ajax in any manner, whether as a beginner or as a pro, then WordPress & Ajax by Ronald Huereca is the book you want. It is so far the most comprehensive, direct, and effective way to learn about WordPress and Ajax with actual practical examples and code samples. The digital book is now in its 2nd edition, and I strongly suggest that you get it. This book has practically helped my sites, including RA Project, tremendously.

You may have heard of Ronald Huereca already. He is the developer of the world famous Ajax Edit Comments, and he is also one of the original writers here at RA Project. His contributions are well known by the core WordPress developers and community, and the 1st edition of his digital book comes highly recommended by many of those considered to be the WordPress elite.

I know reviews are boring. People write reviews solely to get referrals or more visitors. Keep reading this review to fully realize why I recommend this book, how this book has changed my life and the value of my websites, and how you can get this special book for the lowest price on earth just for being on RA Project.

WordPress & Ajax E-Book is a 2nd edition digital download of an actual book that has now become kind of a standard for people interested in Ajax and WordPress. With 294 pages, fully revised chapters, all updated coding examples and samples to be compliant with the upcoming WordPress 3.1 release, and brand new chapters, the book is a massive improvement over the already great 1st edition which garnered it kind of a cult following.

Will you benefit from WordPress & Ajax?

Absolutely! Unless you do not want to learn about Ajax being implemented on WordPress on your WordPress sites, this book will help you step up your Ajax skills very nicely. I will cut to the chase and tell you one exact real world example from around October of last year when this book helped me save and transform my site, The Reasoner, from the doom of slow page loads and dozens of script errors.

This book has changed my life. If you know my The Reasoner site, you know it undergoes the most minute and grand changes and experiments by me almost every week. Last year, it became very slow and I labelled the slowness to the popularity of the site. The front page alone took more than a minute to load. I run my own hosting company, and I knew for a fact that the servers I have were awesomely awesome! So why the slow page loads? Well, after many months of trying small things whenever I felt like it, I finally plunged into talking to Ronald and getting this book. Boy. You should check out the speed of my site now –> www.thereasoner.com – I basically edited a lot of WordPress theme files and also a lot of plugins to modify their performance. All with the help of Ronald and this exact book. I was using over 90 plugins on my site, and in addition to narrowing down my plugins list, I modified a lot of plugins to remove any extra unwanted calls or functions from them. Ronald helped me tremendously with this, and the result is my even better than before and faster than ever website. Now my website, with extra images and everything, should take less than 5 seconds to load.

This book has saved my visitors countless hours and saved me from losing a lot of money from advertisors and lost sales. This book is very practical. The first time I read it, I thought I was learning a new dialect of some Zimbabwe language, which I have heard a lot from some people I knew long time ago. However, after I spent some time understanding what’s going on and actually getting some help or 2 in understanding more things from Ronald, I knew what different things did, and how different functions and scripts loaded. I still do not know how WordPress functions on most levels, but I definitely can see many things and understand what they may be doing. And now my site loads in record time, compared to taking over 60 seconds to fully load a page and its elements like it did before.

After over a year of my sites crying for me to murder the slow page loads & dozens of script errors, I got this book. After a week, I was the perfect murderer. THANK YOU!

What’s inside the book?

A lot! I usually turn to the table of contents in any technical book, as that is usually the easiest thing to understand in such books. You can also read a free preview of WordPress & Ajax to see what you will be diving into.

Here is an actual page snapshot from the book, page 146:

Following is a brief summary of what I can understand and what has helped me here and there so far. The book offers a lot more than this: I am just covering the basics of what I dived into a bit to see what can be applied immediately to The Reasoner in one example.

1. Introduction to Ajax. This book is not for beginners who have no idea what programming or php coding is all about, but the introductory chapter does a good job at explaining what Ajax is. You can quickly pick up the pieces and on your own investigate other things elsewhere via Google or the free book resources and links offered on the book website to help you gain more familiarity with stuff. I had to read this chapter more than once to get the feeling that I could actually salvage my websites.
2. How WordPress and external scripts work. No brainers. This shows you how things work. This will also help you in looking at the source code of your plugins and see what different functions and things are doing.
3. How to code your Ajax scripts properly to work with WordPress. This is the part that can also really help you in figuring out whether or not any plugins you have are coded poorly and may actually be slowing down your site.
4. How to make your scripts more secure.
5. Adding styles to your Ajax scripts.
6. Understanding how loading WordPress scripts works.
7. Optimizing your scripts to load more efficiently. This helped a lot! I still understand it less than 10%, but from what I have gathered and tested a bit on many plugins on my sites including The Reasoner, you can actually get surprised more than once finding out how many different plugins on your site are actually extremely inefficient or doing more harm than good.
8. Full detailed explanation of the infamous Nonces and Escape API. Ever installed WordPress? Then you have seen “Nonces” without knowing what the heck they are. Now I know what they are! *tries to remember … looks at the book again*
9. Step by step process and example of creating your first Ajax script from scratch. Very easy to follow. However, I have not created any such script from scratch myself.
10. Detailed intro and understanding of the essential WordPress and Admin Ajax that comes with every WordPress installation. I am reading this now!

What else do you get with the digital download?

Well the digital download is basically a high resolution premium PDF download that you can read in your browser or download anywhere and read it anytime. The book has a lot of links and resources linking to the book website [ www.wpajax.com ] which gives you the additional resources I told you about. I had to combine these with google from time to time to get more into the reasons why my sites were crying.

In addition to the actual book, you get the entire resources and code samples available online on the WP Ajax website, available to explore, copy paste, download and more. I have not utilized any of these yet, but they are all available at my disposal. And everything is available via the online account, so I can refer to the entire book and download it from anywhere on any computer, including onto my phone.

The biggest benefit? If you buy the book today and get unlimited updates to the book, via e-mail and your account, for free for life! Yes, this deal and book are that special! I will get the 3rd edition, the 4th edition, all the way to the 10000th edition and beyond for free. If Ronald and I and this planet are still alive in 10,000 years, that is. *shivers in horror*

Does RA Project recommend you buy the book? Yes!

Do I also recommend this book? Of course! If you have been a loyal reader to The Reasoner or RA Project, you may have noticed an influx in the speed of these websites. This book is the reason why. My reason is so small compared to the big reason: making your own Ajax apps to work with WordPress!

Go ahead and buy the WordPress & Ajax digital book today. You will be more than happy with it! Let’s see if you can make your site faster than mine! Let me know if you do!

Special Discount Only for RA Project Readers

After talking directly with Ronald, I have managed to secure a special offer just for RA Project readers like yourself. Buy this digital book download now and get it for ONLY $9.99 , instantly delivered to your email! That is $15 less than the regular price, and $5 less than any other special on this book on this planet. That is less than what the price was when I downloaded the book! Lucky you!

For only $9.99, which is the price offered only and only to my RA Project readers here, you will get the book, all the coding and resources, all downloadable content, unlimited access to your book from any computer in the world, and unlimited updates for life. That is one of my ways of thanking you for being here at RA Project!

What are you waiting for? Get WordPress & Ajax, start reading and trying WordPress and Ajax today!

I’ll (at this site and at The Reasoner) start planning and working on and releasing some books (digital and print) later this year (hopefully) focusing on different topics like WordPress, blogging, websites, being successful online, and more (including videos)! The Reasoner side will cover more life-related and other topics.

Follow @besz