Enterprise Integration is like pornography; hard to define, but you know it when you see it. That was before I read this book. While I still don't have a complete definition, I'm far close thanks to this well written and informative book. There were a number of things I liked about this book, including the fact that it did not talk down to you and spend the first third of the book teaching you Ruby, although a Ruby quick reference appendix a la "Text Processing in Python" (Mertz, 2003) would not be out of place.

Head Rush Ajax is a great beginning course that covers a few fundamental JavaScript programming concepts. A beginning web developer will benefit from its slow, repetitivestyle that mixes graphics, conversational text, handwritten notes and homework-like exercises. Developers experienced with JavaScript or looking for a JavaScript or Document Object Model (DOM) reference book should consider a different book.

To start off, I should probably admit that I originally learned to program with Python 1.5 using the original version of this book. This latest version is a lot bigger, almost 600 pages versus the original's 360 or so, and the type in the new version is also a little smaller. This makes some sense, in the original there was always the sense that Python was a work in progress, and now since it's gotten much more popular and well defined, there's a lot more to cover. This means that generally, almost all of the original material has been kept, so any references you may have relied upon previously should be intact. I was thrilled to see that the slicing index figure (page 38 of the old version, page 83 of the new version) was kept.