Yesterday, I read couple of chapters on ASP.NET Ajax,and jQuery from my ASP.NET 4.0 book and I found those frameworks pretty interesting and decide to learn more about it. Today, I borrow some books from library on AJAX and Javascript. It seems ASP.NET ajax is different from Ajax and jQuery seems like the "new" javascript. Is that means I can skip javascript and learn jQUERY directly? On the other hand, the Ajax(non asp.net) book I borrow from library seems apply to the client side web programming only and looks quite difference from what I learned from ASP.NET AJAX. If I'm a ASP.NET developer I guess I should stick with ASP.NET AJAX instead of client side AJAX right? What about PHP? Is there a "PHP AJAX" similar to ASP.NET AJAX?

It's not that I'm "lazy" to learn other tools, but I just want to focus on the right ones. Thx.

The more I going deep