Product Description

A good web development framework anticipates what you need to do and makes those tasks easier and more efficient; jQuery practically reads your mind. Developers of every stripe-hobbyists and professionals alike-fall in love with jQuery the minute they've reduced 20 lines of clunky JavaScript into three lines of elegant, readable code. This new, concise JavaScript library radically simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages.

jQuery in Action, like jQuery itself, is a concise tool designed to make you a more efficient and effective web developer. In a short 300 pages, this book introduces you to the jQuery programming model and guides you through the major features and techniques you'll need to be productive immediately. The book anchors each new concept in the tasks you'll tackle in day-to-day web development and offers unique lab pages where you immediately put your jQuery knowledge to work.

There are dozens of JavaScript libraries available now, with major companies like Google, Yahoo and AOL open-sourcing their in-house tools. This book shows you how jQuery stacks up against other libraries and helps you navigate interaction with other tools and frameworks.

jQuery in Action offers a rich investigation of the up-and-coming jQuery library for client-side JavaScript. This book covers all major features and capabilities in a manner focused on getting the reader up and running with jQuery from the very first sections. Web Developers reading this book will gain a deep understanding of how to use jQuery to simplify their pages and lives, as well as learn the philosophy behind writing jQuery-enhanced pages.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8294 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 347 pages

About the Author
Bear Bibeault has been working in the area of web applications since the mid-90s, getting started with beta versions of JSP and Servlets. He is a senior moderator at the popular JavaRanch site, and has contributed articles to that site's JavaRanch Journal. He also co-authored two other Manning books: Ajax in Practice and Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action. Bear works and resides in Austin, TX.

Yehuda Katz contributes actively to jQuery, heading up the plugin development team. He also runs Visual jQuery, a dynamic, brosable version of the jQuery API, used heavily by new users of the library and core developers alike. Born in Minnesota and raised in New York, he now lives in sunny Santa Barbara, CA, where he works for Procore Technologies.

Customer Reviews

jQuery is the cats pjyamas for Javascript DOM manipulation.
If you've ever tried to do DOM manipulation of a web page and had to deal with browser quirks you'll find jQuery and this book will make you want to look at web development again with a reinvigorated spirit. jQuery does a brilliant job of levelling the playing field giving you a Javascript library that abstracts away the complexites behind a common API. It's extensible to via plug-ins, so the scope for enhancement is there.
The authors have a wry sense of humour that is refreshing and informative. Maybe this books adage should be.. "The labs are worth a thousand words". Whenever things get a bit heavy going, you can run the lab examples and get your heads around things. It's a great way to hone your jQuery skills.
Chapter 8 contains some of the most interesting stuff for me. It covers using jQuery with Ajax. For this you'll need to host the apps in Tomcat. A familiarity with Java helps a bit here, so you'll understand the conversations revolving around servlets. (Though I think PHP will do to).
If you've used SAX, JDOM or similar parser technologies on the Java server-side, you'll appreciate how succint and cool this technology is. You can achieve big things with minimal effort. As well as being able to do XPath type node selection, you can do CSS style selector syntax matching. (Try Googling on selectors and look at the pattern table in the W3C docs).
If your a novice or a rusty Javascipt developer, the Appendices give a good refresher on the likes of closures. All in all this is a good book with excellent examples which I thoroughly recommend.

Highly informative and entertainingly written
Very thorough and readable stuff, written by real experts. If you've not come across jQuery yet, you'll be amazed at what you'll be doing in a very short time.

Quality jQuery title
This book is rocks and so does jQuery. Suitable for beginners and advanced developers.

As a freelance Interface Developer I have found this book so valuable. Has been taken to every contract with me since I bought it.

Might have to hook myself up the second addition.