What do you think?
Rate this book
[(Learning JQuery 1.3 )] [Author: Karl Swedberg] [Feb-2009]
Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques In Detail To build interesting, interactive sites, developers are turning to JavaScript libraries such as jQuery to automate common tasks and simplify complicated ones. Because many web developers have more experience with HTML and CSS than with JavaScript, the library's design lends itself to a quick start for designers with little programming experience. Experienced programmers will also be aided by its conceptual consistency. Revised and updated for version 1.3 of jQuery, this book teaches you the basics of jQuery for adding interactions and animations to your pages. Even if previous attempts at writing JavaScript have left you baffled, this book will guide you past the pitfalls associated with AJAX, events, effects, and advanced JavaScript language features. In this book, the authors share their knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm about jQuery to help you get the most from the library and to make your web applications shine. The book introduces jQuery and shows how you can write a functioning jQuery program in just three lines of code. It then guides you through CSS selectors and shows how to enhance the basic event handling mechanisms to give them a more elegant syntax. You will then learn to add impact to your actions through a set of simple visual effects and also to create, copy, reassemble, and embellish content using jQuery's DOM modification methods. You will also learn to send and retrieve information with AJAX methods. The book will then step you through many detailed, real-world examples and even equip you to extend the jQuery library itself with your own plug-ins. What you will learn from this book? This book will give you the tools you need to be on the cutting edge of the web development community. With these techniques at your disposal, you This book begins with a tutorial to jQuery, followed by an examination of common, real-world client-side problems, and solutions to each of them making it an invaluable resource for answers to all your jQuery questions. Who this book is written for? This book is for web designers who want to create interactive elements for their designs, and for developers who want to create the best user interface for their web applications. Basic JavaScript programming knowledge is required. You will need to know the basics of HTML and CSS, and should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript. No knowledge of jQuery is assumed, nor is experience with any other JavaScript libraries required.
Paperback
First published February 13, 2009
7 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 19, 2009
I started using jQuery a few weeks ago and immediately saw that it would become an indispensable part of my toolkit. Javascript development has always been a tedious and aggravating exercise for me, but with jQuery it has become a real joy. The api lets you accomplish big things in a concise way. The online documentation is very good, for both jQuery and jQuery UI, so you don't have to waste a lot of time guessing how to accomplish your tasks. DOM traversal and manipulation is a breeze. There is a wide range of plugins available, and the ones I've tried have been well documented and work well.
The api is pretty large, which is why I bought this book. I was hoping to get a better overview than I could get by reading brief tutorials and the reference material. The book definitely delivers, and more.
The book starts with a lengthy tutorial on jQuery selectors. The selectors are based on css selectors, extended with navigational and filtering selectors - for example "#foo:next" will select the node following the node that has id 'foo'. Using css selectors was a brilliant choice, because it more closely models the way we think about web pages.
The book then has chapters on DOM manipulation, AJAX, table handling, forms, UI effects, etc. Each chapter has complete examples (also downloadable from the publisher's site), significant enough to be useful as models for one's own work. The examples work up to a large bookstore example, developed over 3 chapters. The final version of the bookstore shows off most of the features and capabilities of jQuery.
Probably the biggest benefit of this book is that it shows how to use jQuery to cleanly separate content, style, and behavior. Of course, we all think that we do this already, but the examples in this book take that separation to a new level. The html is absolutely clean - no event hooks, relatively few class attributes, and id attribues mostly for identifying large structural elements. The css is minimal and minimally repetitive. The javascript is cleanly separated into style-based and behavior-based code.
I've begun adopting this approach in my own work, and it is already making a big difference. And of course this approach makes it possible for a web designer and a developer to collaborate most effectively.
You will benefit from this book even if you are already somewhat familiar with jQuery. Be sure to get the one reviewed here - there is an older version that covers jQuery 1.2, but there are significant differences betweeen version 1.2 and 1.3.
The api is pretty large, which is why I bought this book. I was hoping to get a better overview than I could get by reading brief tutorials and the reference material. The book definitely delivers, and more.
The book starts with a lengthy tutorial on jQuery selectors. The selectors are based on css selectors, extended with navigational and filtering selectors - for example "#foo:next" will select the node following the node that has id 'foo'. Using css selectors was a brilliant choice, because it more closely models the way we think about web pages.
The book then has chapters on DOM manipulation, AJAX, table handling, forms, UI effects, etc. Each chapter has complete examples (also downloadable from the publisher's site), significant enough to be useful as models for one's own work. The examples work up to a large bookstore example, developed over 3 chapters. The final version of the bookstore shows off most of the features and capabilities of jQuery.
Probably the biggest benefit of this book is that it shows how to use jQuery to cleanly separate content, style, and behavior. Of course, we all think that we do this already, but the examples in this book take that separation to a new level. The html is absolutely clean - no event hooks, relatively few class attributes, and id attribues mostly for identifying large structural elements. The css is minimal and minimally repetitive. The javascript is cleanly separated into style-based and behavior-based code.
I've begun adopting this approach in my own work, and it is already making a big difference. And of course this approach makes it possible for a web designer and a developer to collaborate most effectively.
You will benefit from this book even if you are already somewhat familiar with jQuery. Be sure to get the one reviewed here - there is an older version that covers jQuery 1.2, but there are significant differences betweeen version 1.2 and 1.3.
May 7, 2012
This was probably one of the better programming books I've read, which is surprising since the last book I'd read published by the same company was garbage written by a semi literate (well, non English speaking) 'team' of Husband & wife. This book was well written, well structured & thoughtfully considered. I'd say it was separated into firstly a 'how to' section, which delved into the techniques of creating & editing DOM elements, changing styles & various other things like events, chaining, effects & how to extend jQuery. The second part was a jQuery cook book with start to finish lessons on creating things like carousels & table manipulation as well as the use of various plugins out there. Lastly the Appendix had a small wealth of information regarding supporting tools, online resources & finally a very good section on closures. While this book was not exhaustive in all touching upon every aspect of jQuery (no mention of caching for example), it did do well with a most of the core aspects of the language & the bread and butter stuff. In addition to this, the publishers offer a sister reference guide which serves as a touchstone to all that jQuery has on offer. This was a good book & got this guy up to speed from an almost zero understanding of jQuery.
February 22, 2012
I've used jQuery from time to time for a number of years now but only for very simple tasks, usually where any problem could be solved with a quick Google search. Lately though, I've been working on something just a bit more involved (still pretty simple in 'real' developers' eyes I'm sure!), so I decided to dust this off and actually read it at long last. I'm very glad I did.
The book seemed to be pitched at just the right level for me - some experience of coding and jQuery, but not a lot. It skips over the really, really basic stuff fairly fast and quickly covers all the core features of the library. These are followed by some relatively meaty examples of real-world use which I found challenging to understand, but not impossible. This is a good thing - really basic examples wouldn't have made me think about what was going on as hard.
I definitely learned a lot, and the well-written text meant I enjoyed the reading experience too - highly recommended.
The book seemed to be pitched at just the right level for me - some experience of coding and jQuery, but not a lot. It skips over the really, really basic stuff fairly fast and quickly covers all the core features of the library. These are followed by some relatively meaty examples of real-world use which I found challenging to understand, but not impossible. This is a good thing - really basic examples wouldn't have made me think about what was going on as hard.
I definitely learned a lot, and the well-written text meant I enjoyed the reading experience too - highly recommended.
March 26, 2009
I was a little worried that there might be a lot of duplication between this book and the "jQuery Reference Guide" since they're both by the same pair of authors. But instead of duplication, I found complementary material. I highly recommend both if you're interested in jQuery. And who isn't?? :-)
December 9, 2009
Thorough and easy to read. The examples are concise but very useful and non-trivial. Will have to re-read multiple times to extract maximum value from it.
May 11, 2010
The book to learn about jQuery.
June 12, 2010
So far this book has explained the parent/ancestor relationship within the code that helps the program function. I hope to put this to good use creating a web site in the next 2 weeks.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.