It appears that the distance from XHTML and CSS to AJAX is a bit farther than I thought. While I am able to follow the browser side of the process, the server side appears to be quite complex.
In order to create a web page that is truly an AJAX page, there has to be XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX on the page. On the server there needs to be a SQL database, which would typically be MySQL, and PHP code that interacts with the database and of course JaveScript as well.
Luckily, I have programmed in the past so this is really just learning new syntax for new languages but there is a whole lot more here than I first thought.
Today, I did create a simplistic AJAX page that queried a remote database and updated two fields on a web page without updating the rest of the page. I have been following along in the Head Rush AJAX book. Yes, I said Head Rush. It appears that the Head Rush books present a more accelerated version of the process than the Head First books.