Learning jQuery 1.3 [Kindle Edition]

I'm a programmer with lots of experience in several languages, although I never learned JavaScript -- nor had I done client-side web programming outside of static (X)HTML and CSS.

I decided it was time to close this gap, so I chose JQuery as my framework to abstract away the headaches I'd heard about JavaScript, and I chose Learning jQuery 1.3 as my means to learn the platform.

The book provides an excellent tour of jQuery's capabilities, although the jQuery UI package is not covered (the publisher offers this in a different book).

Each chapter covers a different aspect of jQuery programming, starting with simple examples and finishing with complex/completed functionality. Since this was my first dive into browser-side programming, I also found the book to be an excellent overview for creating the various behaviors I'd seen in practice (such as animating web content, validating forms, and refreshing data without refreshing the page).

New concepts are introduced along the way, and potential "gotchas" are exposed by presenting them as what you think you'd do next -- but are then followed by an explanation as to why it's the wrong thing to do. The book also contains an overview of many of the more popular jQuery plug-ins.

You're best off downloading the accompanying source code if you want to try the examples yourself, because non-relevant portions of the code and accompanying CSS don't always appear in the text. My only complaint lies with the example code: It isn't always well-commented. jQuery's syntax and extensive chaining can sometimes be non-intuitive, so good commenting is a must in a book like this.

It's been nearly two years since the first edition of Learning jQuery was published. In my review of the initial version, I highly recommended it to anyone wanting to learn more about jQuery. I am quite pleased to say that this update is equally as good, bringing the reader up to speed on all the improvements that have been made since. Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer have masterfully refined the examples in Learning jQuery 1.3 to reflect the latest code base.

If you are still on the fence about delving into jQuery, know that there are a lot of successful companies who are using it already, such as those listed on the jQuery home page: CBS, Dell, Digg, Google, NBC, Netflix, WordPress -- to name a few. Additionally, Microsoft has made jQuery their JavaScript library of choice, for the upcoming .NET MVC framework -- which is somewhat akin to Ruby on Rails.

It is no secret that I am a huge fan of jQuery. In fact, I recently wrote a chapter for an upcoming jQuery book by O'Reilly. Believe me when I say that Karl really knows jQuery and is one of the brightest developers I know. This is a book not to be missed, especially if you are going to frequently be writing JavaScript.

One of the most notable improvements has been in the speed of CSS style selectors. Rather than doing a top-down pass at elements, the latest version of jQuery finds things via a bottom-up approach called Sizzle. This is similar to the way browsers apply stylesheets, and allows jQuery to be significantly faster.

Another key improvement, one that did not exist before, is the addition of "live" effects. Essentially, this allows you to add event listeners on any currently existing elements in a page, as well as all future elements that match the criteria. This means that parts of a page dynamically updated via Ajax can also have enriched interactivity, without calling additional functions to re-parse the page. Under the hood, this is done via abstracted event delegation.

Another thing that has changed since the original book is that "toggle" can now handle two or more functions, cycled through, rather than being limited to only two, as was the case with older versions of jQuery. This means that a single element can be the trigger for an unlimited events throughout a page.

Without specifically calling out every nuance that has been improved upon, suffice it to say that jQuery has continuously been refined and tuned for speed and browser compatibility over the past few years. Enough so, that even if you have the first edition, getting the latest version of this book will greatly benefit your development team, or even you as an individual if you work as a freelancer.

I'm not one to write reviews here very often - this only is my second. But I feel strongly enough about how this book's content is presented that I had to come here and hopefully prevent some disappointed purchases.

I personally learn best by doing something - seeing a working example and then taking it apart and observing what changing something does.

This book is not very good for that. The code in the text is presented in blocks and snippets of code. There is sample code you can download, but it is all completed code after being altered through the end of the relevant chapter. The code I've looked at in the sample downloads looks NOTHING like what you see in the book.

The writers go to great lengths explaining about each new concept, but again, the example to show how the concept works is presented in a snippet and the reader is left to figure out how to add that to the existing code that has been written thus far in the chapter.

It is because of this that I DO NOT recommend this book to the beginning developer. I am at an intermediate level of programming myself and have spent way too much time trying to figure out how to add the code presented in the book to what has already been written.

There are even inconsistencies in code from one block to the next when a new concept is added. Case in point: if you have the book, compare the code on page 57 to the code it is supposed to be based on, on page 55. Whether the difference is a typo, or failure to explain the difference in code, I can't tell. Hence I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to add the new concept into the existing code myself.

Much of my dislike for the book is based on person learning style, but I think the writers could do a better job in providing more useful, in-context, working code.