Smashing JQuery: Professional Techniques with Ajax and JQuery (Smashing Magazine Book Series) [Paperback]

Without any doubt, the worst developers guide I have come across.

Lovely print quality, with heavy and glossy paper, so first impressions are excellent. However...

From the beginning I found erroneous examples, where text seems to have been copy and pasted wrongly. Parts of the explanations were therefore discussing the wrong code samples. Then some of screen shots were obviously incorrect. And all the while, the code examples are repetitive in the extreme. These, illustrated step by step, repeat all of the code in each step, so that a 9 line code segment may end up with an additional 30 repeated lines. This becomes tedious by the end of the first code sample, but is repeated all the way through the book. I did not bother counting the number of pages given over to the Latin text content for the HTML being manipulated. But one example had a whole page of Latin elements!

At a guess, this 320 page book could be reduced to less than 100, and in so doing it may even be improved. I could not, in good conscience, recommend this book to anyone.

Would Amazon accept this one back for the reasons stated above? I doubt it.

A couple of months before getting this book I read the Sitepoint book "jQuery: Novice to Ninja". It's an excellent book and I highly recommend it jQuery: Novice to Ninja (or alternatively, jQuery in Action, Second Edition though not as easy for beginners as Novice to Ninja).

When the Smashing book came out, I thought I'd get it to compare - Smashing Magazine being quite a trendy setup and I had high hopes for it.

The initial impression was wow - lovely colour screenshots, great layout and even the code samples are colour highlighted as in an IDE.

Looking at the contents, a sense of deja-vu - it's almost the same, and in the same order, as the Sitepoint book. But no harm there. Jake Rutter emphasizes the importance of unobtrusive Javascript, graceful degradation, progressive enhancement - just like Sitepoint, clearly on the ball there with trendy (and true) thinking.

Then I started to notice the errors. So I looked at the other reviews on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk and yes, lots of complaints about errors, sufficient for one person to return their copy! I jumped to the advanced chapter to see if there's any useful info there not in the Sitepoint book - how about Ajax? In the Sitepoint book it's relegated to Appendix A. Jake's book covers Ajax, but again, spoils it. The server side is a cop out, assumed to be beyond the scope of the book. A simple PHP form handler would have been much more useful! And again, statements that shock me with disbelief:

"POST requests are different from GET requests in that they post the data to the server-side process behind the scenes, which makes them safer, especially for transmitting sensitive data." On the next page he writes "The POST request is perfectly suited for submitting contact forms because they usually contain personal and confidential information that you need to keep secure." WOW! You mean like credit card details? Without SSL encryption? This guy is clearly on the designer side of life, without a clue what goes on "behind the scenes". Of course, the only way POST is more secure than GET is in the latter, the parameters are on the URL and can therefore be copied as bookmarks or emailed as a URL - not something you want to do with "sensitive" data. But anyone with wireshark or juggler can see the data is transmitted unencrypted, and therefore just as insecure.

Finally the writing style, or lack thereof. Maybe it's the over-use of writing in the first person present-tense: "I'm going to show you how to manipulate data that is in the tables. When I say manipulate I mean... I explain the following solutions... I use the following HTML table..." (page 161, but very typical, and that's over just a few sentences). It quickly gets tedious and reads as if self-centred.

Switch over to the Sitepoint book, and it's all about us and we... it just seems friendlier.

In short, the Sitepoint book was written by two highly experienced writers and was proof-read by a team of experts. It looks like Jake had no help, and he needed it.

What a shame!
Flashy to look at, but did anyone (proof) read it?
I found the type in the examples very difficult to read; does the author produce websites like this?
The difference between ( and { is difficult to spot. In some cases the {s and the }s do not match. Fundamental programming!
I've only worked through about a quarter of the code and so far the errors are dreadful.
Some code examples are simply wrong!!!!!!
If you are OK with javascript you may see some of the errors a mile off! BUT if you are new to scripting this would destroy your confidence.
I do hope the rest of the book is more carefully written as the more complicated stuff may be too far gone to resolve without expert help...which is er.... why I bought the book!

Again, if you are OK with javascript you may be able to sort it out, but isn't that what Mr Rutter was paid to do?

A lost opportunity. This is not what I would call a professional book!

P.s Now having worked on - it gets worse. Sudden changes in coding approaches are made with no warning only some vague explanation out of sequence.
Examples with no clear results, more errors. It's now in for a refund.