Is it worth learning ASP.Net AJAX

Question

I know this is a duplicate kind of question. I have worked with ASP.Net and ASP.Net MVC 1.0. I never really got a chance to get into ASP.Net AJAX.

My question is it really worth to invest in learning ASP.Net AJAX 3.5 or 4.0 given the fact, I have hardly used it ?

Please let me know your advise.

EDIT : - Thanks all for your response. Robert\Justin\etc have provided valuable insight.

I have a copy of ASP.Net AJAX In Action in my office library. My guess this book should be pretty enough for me, though It was for ASP.Net 2.0. Do I need to invest in books\Time for ASP.Net AJAX 3.5 or 4.0 ?

Answer 1

There are so many Ajax Libraries out there, is not even funny. Here is a good link on what is out there.

Since we already use ASP.net, I made sure to spend a little bit of time familiarizing myself with asp.net ajax. Just enough to do the basics. However, for everything else, we use jQuery, which, by the way, integrates nicely with ASP.Net. Have you ever wondered why the ASP.Net team has started supporting jQuery: intellisense, included scripts, contributing to the project, doing demos with it, etc...

So here is my 2 cents. Look into the basics in asp.net ajax but focus your efforts into, IMHO, a better library like jQuery.

Good luck! -D