Google cuts the ribbon on its AJAX Playground

Having written three books on programming in a series that was called "By Example," I know first-hand that sometimes several hundred pages of written text doesn't really beat the ability to see something for yourself, tweak it, and find out what happens.

Not that Google has ever really been that big on documentation anyway; but this morning, it's unveiled something that's perhaps several hundred times better: Its new AJAX API playground lets JavaScript programmers not only sample all the major API calls in Google's toolbox in the context of functions, but tweak those samples and see the results live.

In a blog post this morning, Google engineer Ben Lisbakken wrote, "I have been working on this in my 20% time and today I am proud to announce that we are launching the AJAX API Playground as the official way that Google will show JavaScript samples!"

(Note to the Justice Dept. working with Microsoft on its API documentation project: You may want to take note of what's going on here.)