Jeremy Keith did a nice job at Web Directions South in his talk entitled “Explaining Ajax” of gently introducing those unfamiliar, and familiar alike to Ajax and the concepts that make it tick. His presentation walks through the history and evolution of Ajax, and concludes with a fun game of identifying Ajax at work (the audience was surprisingly wrong on a few occasions). The presentation podcast and slides are free to download.
You may also find his presentation on Hijax equally as interesting, which identifies the Accessibility and Usability shortcomings of Ajax and offers an alternate way of using it to be backwards compatible and allows it to gracefully degrade.
I was there! I attended his 1 day workshop on DOM Scripting and the Explaining AJAX session. He was very impressive. His passion for accessible DOM scripting is inspiring.
Lucky you! It’s great to listen to such an understated expert on the subject who’s not goofy, or trying too hard to be funny, but instead commands a lot of respect for what he knows and how he presents himself. Wish I had had the opportunity to be there, but the podcast was really great too.