Learning jQuery 1.3 [Paperback]

A lot of web designers, myself included, are mostly concerned with the way things look when people visit the web sites we create. We're all about the design -- layout, typography, colour, graphics and how they enhance the user experience. We start with some sketches, do some wire-frames and rapidly move into software like Photoshop or Fireworks in order to get a pleasing aesthetic result that we'll eventually piece together on the web using HTML and CSS. Whilst most designers find markup and stylesheets relatively easy to master, javascript sits firmly in the programming camp. It's all about integers, boleans, strings and other scary sounding bits and bobs that often require a logical and mathematically able brain to understand.

Yet javascript opens up a world of exciting behavioural options to us. It enables us to bring our pages to life with all the wizzy and cool stuff that clients love. Things swishing in and out of view, dropping down, sliding, expanding and contracting. Javascript brings our flat designs to life. But it's difficult. That's one reason why jQuery were invented -- to make life easier for web designers. If you've already mastered HTML and CSS then you'll find jQuery a logical next step. It uses a similar code style to CSS rather than the all out alien language of raw javascript. Learning jQuery 1.3 from Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-847196-70-5) is the only book you'll need to get started with the library if like me you're a web design who wants to add a little extra umph to your designs.

You'll realise that this is definitive tome when you see that it contains a glowing foreword by John Resig, the creator of jQuery. He praises the authors, who he knows personally and gives Karl Sedberg a particular thumbs-up for his excellent knack for the English language. Indeed the themes in this book are relayed to the reader in accessible chunks of to-the-point tutorial that will immediately have you eager to boot up your PC and get cracking with showing and hiding, fading, bringing content into the page by the power of AJAX, sorting tables and all manner of glittering delights that were hitherto beyond your mortal reach.

I was in the process of building a new website using the usual solid webstandards that have kept me in work with my current employer for the last seven years when this book landed in my in-tray. One chapter in and I was hooked. My original pretty and functional site was soon awash with plenty of little jQuery effects and goodies. Probably overkill for what was actually needed but once you start playing it becomes pretty difficult to leave alone. Remember when you discovered all those photoshop layer effects? Remember how you used them in earnest way back when? You're going to do the same again here. But as time goes on you learn to use where appropriate and go go throwing everything including the kitchen sink into a design. JQuery is another set of tools to add to your ever expanding web design toolbox and this is the manual.

This book is aimed to jQuery beginners, or for those with more experience who need an extra help on that difficult situations. It's a must if you don't wanna have trouble every time you need to do something different with version 1.3

The new version of the book is now packed with good references, and examples. Most of them are day-to-day examples (chapter one to six), but things get a hotter after chapter seven, where more complex examples and explanations are given.

jQuery 1.3 is really nice, and adds a whole new world of event listeners (.live() and .die()) and a thorough support feature (jquery.support). All of the new features are massively explained in this book. The language used is still the same from the previous book, and couldn't be better. It's very easy to comprehend, and you don't need to be a guru programmer to be able to understand and even create most of the examples.

There's a whole new chapter dedicated to plugins, which is something I've been interested to dive into, but couldn't find enough information over the internet.

All the code samples are easy to understand and very well commented. They can be downloaded from the web should you not want to type everything again.

This book is a revised and updated version of an earlier version of the book. I would start off by saying that if anyone wants to learn jQuery from the roots up to a level of decent expertise, go for this book, it would be worth every penny spent. Thats how much I liked this book. The book starts from the very basics starting with simple examples and progresses with each chapter into more complex and real world examples with a step by step explanation of the code. You cant ask for more than that, really.

The book is based on the latest version of jQuery (1.3) which is why it includes the new .live() and .die() events. These two events are pretty magical, as they can bind or unbind event handlers to objects that get created on the fly as well. So, if you have a link within a div with a click handler on it, it would work but only on that link. Any new links you add dynamically (e.g. loading rss feeds etc via AJAX) wont have the event listeners attached to them. With the .live() event, you can do that . I find in pretty magical!

The book also goes at length to explain the plugin architecture and the best practices to write universally consumable plugins without breaking or interrupting any other user defined or plugin defined code. Infact, it also lists the most widely known plugins in the jQuery world in one of the chapters. There is a whole chapter on plugins!

One thing that I really liked about the book is its emphasis on `Progresive enhancement`, also known as `graceful degradation'. What that actually means is, all the examples and concepts explained in the book, start off with a very simple code which would work (or gracefully degrade) even if Javascript was disabled in the client browser, before processing on with the details of the jQuery code in the example. To me, this is like, going the extra mile to explain the concept and I was pretty impressed by this approach.