I’m diving into AJAX, Java, IDEs, and all kinds of other crazy crap. I’m kinda curious why though. What are some good examples of AJAX sites?
I don’t know any good examples, but AJAX is a technique to access data on a server without having to refresh the entire page. There are so many ways in which this could be implemented.
I hear it’s pretty sweet.
the quick reply box/ quick edit is the best thing that happend to forums… 
If you are looking for AJAX inspiration, I suggest for starters you go to:
http://www.ajax.org/
http://www.ajaxdaddy.com/
Otherwise, to learn AJAX, go to:
http://www.ajaxdaddy.com
http://www.ajax.org/
http://www.w3schools.com/Ajax/Default.Asp
I suggest you tackle one language/technology at a time though, just from personal experience. It would be pretty hard to learn Italian, French, and Portuguese concurrently. If you learned Latin first though, it would be a lot easier because the three languages I listed were all derived from Latin. Restated, you should start with lower level languages first, because that is what all of the higher languages are based upon. If you want to learn Javascript, learn Java first. In fact, I would go so far as to say you should focus on learning C (or C++), and Java first (perhaps even Python); everything will come [U]very easily[/U] after that. NetBeans is a good (and free) IDE for Java, a lot like [URL=“http://www.microsoft.com/express/vc/”]Visual Studio (which is also good and free [express editions]). Notepad++ is a must have as well for developing any language. If you plan on learning PHP, Delphi for PHP (not free, but not expensive) is supposed to be pretty frickin nice as well.
Good luck w1sh!
Digg and Facebook use AJAX pretty well.
I agree that to do it all properly learning java first and knowing html and css fully would be great. If you dont have time for that and just want to get some ajax thing working then you could do it the same way I got into ajax, installing ajax im on your webserver:
Ok unless you have lots of users on your site - ajax im probably wont be too useful, but after playing with Ajax Im and making it look how I wanted it to, I was forced to browse through the scripts a few times which gave me a rough idea how all this stuff works, and its given me the confidence to go ahead and use all kind of useful javascript things on my site…
the Google’s gmail uses ajax extensively.
Netvibes is one that pops to mind.