Preface

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) has rapidly become the lingua franca for structured document exchange on the Web, outpacing XML in many domains. Three of the reasons for this are obvious: it plays well with JavaScript, it's simple, and it just works. However, there are other reasons for its success as well. As you'll see in the pages of this book, it's supported by a wide variety of languages and libraries, making it easy to use in all kinds of scenarios.

In this book, I provide recipes for common uses of JSON. You're welcome to read the book from cover to cover, seeing all the ways JSON can be used in building web and standalone applications. However, it's organized as a cookbook, so that you can quickly go to the chapter or recipe that addresses a particular problem you might want to solve with JSON now. I recommend skimming this preface to see what's where, taking a quick look at Chapter 1, Reading and Writing JSON on the Client, or Chapter 2, Reading and Writing JSON on the Server, depending on your interest, and then jumping right to the recipes that interest you the most.