Book review: Learning jQuery

One complaint of just about any book that attempts to teach a new language or technology is a presumed level of expertise by the authors. I found it refreshing that in Learning jQuery the book begins… well, at the beginning, and increases in difficulty along with the concepts. It gives designers and entry-level interface developers the opportunity to come up to speed at an acceptable pace.

While I consider the screenshots to be lacking in quality, overall, this book will definitely leave you satisfied. The essentials required to be successful at developing with jQuery are all touched upon, and the depth of explanation for each piece of code is precise and clear. You will not find yourself flipping through chapters of fluff, added only to beef up the number of pages. Each tutorial and example is carefully planned and executed.

Describing concepts in relation to any JavaScript library can be difficult. Since libraries are in fact JavaScript, it can be easy to confuse beginners. The authors are careful not to allow this to happen. This is especially apparent in Chapter 3, when highlighting the event model, event capturing and event bubbling. A clear distinction is made between browser implementations and the unique facets of jQuery. Official documentation is often wanting in these areas, and the book fills in the gaps nicely.

Throughout Learning jQuery, additional notation is included to subtly remind developers of any potential gotchas, which is a nice feature. For instance, while referencing the clone() method, it was noted that only elements of the DOM are copied, and not the events previously associated with those elements. These tips are always appreciated, since in a development environment they can prevent hours of head-scratching, and help eliminate frustration.

I was also impressed that the authors cover both JSON and XML as data-interchange formats in Chapter 6, AJAX–How to Make Your Site Buzzword-Compliant. This illustrates conformity not to a single standard, but to real-world development scenarios, where you might encounter both formats. My only complaint here is that not enough time was spent specifically on jQuery’s $.ajax() method for AJAX implementations, since in my experience this tends to be more popular than the $.get() method.

The only change I would make to the format of the book would be to divide it into two parts. It is obvious that the authors intended to begin with jQuery key concepts, and then move into cookbook mode. This does happen after Chapter 6, but it would have been helpful to make that distinction more evident. If you do buy the book, be aware that in order to digest these great tutorials, that you should dedicate more time for the latter half of the book.

Finally, I would like to add that although this book does not cover jQuery v.1.2, or the UI plugin, it is still worth the purchase. If you use the latest version of jQuery, and still want to implement the same XPath selectors covered in the book, you just need to download a plugin. You will not find a better resource online for getting into the guts of the jQuery JavaScript library than you will offline reading the book Learning jQuery.

About the Authors

Jonathan Chaffer

“Jonathan Chaffer is the Chief Technology Officer of Structure Interactive, an interactive agency located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There he oversees web development projects using a wide range of technologies, and continues to collaborate on day-to-day programming tasks as well.”
– Excerpt from Learning jQuery

Karl Swedberg

“Karl Swedberg is a web developer at Structure Interactive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he spends much of his time implementing design with a focus on web standards–semantic HTML, well-mannered CSS, and unobtrusive JavaScript.”
– Excerpt from Learning jQuery

Learning jQuery Resources

• Learning jQuery Web site
• PACKT Publishing
• Buy Learning jQuery
• jQuery Web site

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Selectors–How to Get Anything You Want
Chapter 3: Events–How to Pull the Trigger
Chapter 4: Effects–How to Add Flair to Your Actions
Chapter 5: DOM Manipulation–How to Change Your Page on Command
Chapter 6: AJAX–How to Make Your Site Buzzword-Compliant
Chapter 7: Table Manipulation
Chapter 8: Forms with Function
Chapter 9: Shufflers and Rotators
Chapter 10: Plug-ins
Appendix A: Online Resources
Appendix B: Development Tools
Appendix C: JavaScript Closures
Index

• Posted by Brian
• October 23rd, 2007