Following on the success of “Agile Web Development With Rails”, the Pragmatic Programmers released a beta version of “Pragmatic Ajax” before a flood of other Ajax books hit the bookshelves. Unfortunately, unlike its predecessor, this book was released to beta too early, lacking not just final proofing and editing but with entire chapters unwritten. The writing is a little over the top with the motivating story so absurd that it is insulting. Buried in the fluff and the author’s arrogant assertions that they effectively rewrote Google maps in two hours while manning a conference booth, however, there appears to be a lot of good information covering the fundamentals of Ajax using standalone Javascript as well as overviews of several of the dominant toolkits. With any luck, this could turn into a fine book before the final version is shipped.