Ajax offers a solid avenue to really add life to your web design in a multitude of ways. There are plenty of tutorials on the internet that show you how to use Ajax, so trying to find which ones are the best is a rather trying task. Here is a condensed list of some of the top Ajax tutorials on the web to help you get started.
If you are rather new to Ajax and want to experiment with site building, this tutorial is a good place to start. The tutorial employes some PHP and CSS in the process of creating a basic AJAX website. A couple of characteristics about the site you will build are that it has complete support of the browser history, and it will also load some pages via AJAX from the PHP back-end. Once complete, you will have an AJAX enabled site that can be customized to your liking. Every step of the building process is explained, including the XHTML, CSS, jQuery, and PHP, so that you will have a guiding hand to ensure that the site is built without problems.
Ajax offers some advantages that should appeal to site creators. It's web server friendly in the way that it reduces your site's loading times. It also makes site maintenance easier by for those who do not have access to a server side scripting language. These are just a couple of reasons why AJAX is useful, but if you do not have experience in using it, you must start somewhere.
This is another tutorial that beginners can use to practice their AJAX site creation skills. You'll learn how to create a website completely in AJAX. Best of all, you don't even have to have AJAX experience. The tutorial focuses instead on the proper application of AJAX to make a site in a step-by-step manner.
Integrating a chat function into your site could serve many purposes. It can allow your visitors to interact with each other in real-time, or it could allow you or others involved in the site's administration the opportunity to reply to visitors. It could be simple conversation or customer service. Either way, the value of integrated chat cannot be denied. This tutorial will help you create Ajax driven web chat.
The chat program you will create is simplistic, but it offers a good start, especially if you are new when it comes to Ajax. The tutorial is rather lengthy, but well worth the time if you have had the urge to work on creating chat capability. Each section is broken down in detail, including the HTML, JavaScript, sending the request, and the back-end. There's also a section at the end that shows you how to implement some nifty additions to the chat to make it more user-friendly. For example, if you want to make the messages in your chat area scroll automatically, you can do so.
If you want to learn how to integrate and display RSS feeds on your site from other providers, this tutorial will teach you the necessary steps to accomplish the task. The value of the tutorial lies in the fact that it gives you a way to display the RSS feeds in as little time as possible. Thanks to Google Feed API, the feeds are hosted on Google's servers, so your server will be freed from the task of taking on any new installation or hosting responsibilities. All you have to do to get the RSS feeds is to place some code onto your page.
The script detailed in this tutorial comes with several features. The customization options really give you control over the feeds. For instance, you can customize the parts of each RSS entry to be displayed. You can display intermixed feeds as well to offer up even more current data. For better organization, the script can sort the feeds using in different ways too, such as by their date, title, and more. If you specify a set number of feeds to show, the feeds will be divided evenly in the case that you use them in an intermixed format. Improved usability is yet another plus, since you will have the ability to refresh feed content without having to reload pages.
AJAX & Prototype 
