Learning jQuery 1.3 – Book Review

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

Book reviewer Marcos Placona | Publisher: Packt. Author(s): Jonathan Chaffer, Karl Swedberg

This book is aimed to jQuery beginners, or for those with more experience who need an extra help on that difficult situations.

You probably read my review of Learning jQuery back in 2008 where I described every single feature on each of the chapters.

This time, I’m not going to describe every single chapter, as I think it would be pretty much a repetition of the previous review, but adding a few things. I still think this book is a must if you want to learn jQuery, or even if you are familiar with the library.

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, 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.

The book splits up in 16 parts.

• Preface
• Chapter 1: Getting Started
• Chapter 2: Selectors
• Chapter 3: Events
• Chapter 4: Effects
• Chapter 5: DOM Manipulation
• Chapter 6: AJAX
• Chapter 7: Table Manipulation
• Chapter 8: Forms with Function
• Chapter 9: Shufflers and Rotators
• Chapter 10: Using Plugins
• Chapter 11: Developing plugins
• Appendix A: Online Resources
• Appendix B: Development Tools
• Appendix C: JavaScript Closures
• Appendix D: Quick Reference
• Index: Quick Reference

I’d like to leave here my special thanks to the fine guys at Packt who sent me this book for evaluation and technical review