Product Description

Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques. 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. The reader will need 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #217370 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 380 pages

About the Author
Karl Swedberg is a web developer at Structure Interactive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he spends much of his time implementing design with a focus on "web standards"-semantic HTML, well-mannered CSS, and unobtrusive JavaScript. Before his current love affair with web development, Karl worked as a copy editor, a high-school English teacher, and a coffee house owner. His fascination with technology began in the early 1990s when he worked at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and it has continued unabated ever since. Karl's other obsessions include photography, karate, English grammar, and fatherhood. He lives in Grand Rapids with his wife, Sara, and his two children, Benjamin and Lucia.

Customer Reviews

Very good, a must have for the jQuery beginner
Getting started with jQuery does not have to be daunting, this book will definitely help you get started, and show you key techniques to make your code efficient and feature rich.

The book is aimed at jQuery beginners, all it takes is a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, and an understanding of the syntax of JavaScript; no jQuery experience (or any other framework for that matter) is needed or assumed. The book builds up to more advanced topics, but is still mainly aimed at beginners. However, saying that, I consider myself "intermediate" and I learnt a lot of new techniques from this book, and found some of the examples particularly useful.

In general, chapters are well documented and are also backed up by real world examples so you can see the various functions in action. For example, the Chapter entitled "Events - How to pull the trigger" starts off with an overview of jQuery's event handing functionality, then shows a real world example in the form of a style switcher. Chapters are finalised with a useful summary so you can check what you have learnt within the sections.

The book can be read from start to finish, as it is interesting, keeps you engaged, and gives information in a logical order. It contains many useful tips and functions, a lot of which I never knew about until reading the book.

The language used in the book is clear, concise and easy to understand. Tips and important points are highlighted and contain useful tidbits of information. I would have preferred more of these little tips to give the reader a broader understanding of the discussed topics, but they are currently adequate.

Code samples are well formatted and broken down, with added chunks of code emboldened. Live examples are also provided on the accomplying website, which is useful to get a look of what the code samples do. The examples themselves are of a high quality and useful in many real-world situations. Most of the examples are also shown along with screenshots to show you what the code is doing.

The screenshots themselves are a good quality but, being black and white, some are a little hard to understand what is being shown, and a few are slightly blurry. However, the examples themselves are available online so this is not such as big deal.

My only gripes with the book itself are that the headings could be better spaced out to improve legibility, and more importantly the book could have done with a better, bigger, index at the back; it's hard to find certain functions using the current index.

In conclusion, "Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques" is a must have for any developer/designer looking to delve into JavaScript frameworks, and is a welcome addition to my reference book shelf. It beats the official jQuery manual hands down in my opinion, simply because everything is explained in much more detail.

Purely indispensable
Packt sent me a copy of "Learning jQuery" by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. jQuery is a javascript library that I have been using on and off and was delighted to be given a chance to review this book and have a chance to read through and learn about jQuery in a less urgent manner than I had initially.

With a tag-line of "Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques" and some 376 pages long (split into 10 chapters, along with three appendices) the book excels at fulfilling that promise.

From the chapter on Getting Started through selectors (css, dom, xpath), Chaffer and Swedberg examine and show how to use jQuery for animations, ajax and manipulating tables to the all important client-side form validation with disarmingly concise eloquence and skill. They also detail how to use and develop jQuery Plug-ins.

Any of the required server-side code examples, for the AJAX chapter, are in PHP but that doesn't make the book any less relevant or more specialised towards PHP - it should be trivial to rework them for any language.

The authors use an example based approach and this works very well as they continue to progressively enhance each example with additional features and functionality - you can really see their shopping cart and image carousel examples really build up into very well formed examples of what can be done with jQuery.

If you haven't already been turned on to jQuery by it's excellent on-line documentation and fluent API (method chaining), this is the book that will do it.

There is one caveat though: "Learning jQuery" was written for jQuery v1.1 and published in June 2007; version 1.2 of jQuery was released four months later with some substantial changes to the API.
This doesn't matter all that much to be honest; obviously this book doesn't cover what's available in v1.2 but until there's a second edition of this book (and wouldn't that be great?) you won't find a better book on the subject.

Great book but...
This really is an excellent introduction to the subject. Very well written with loads of code examples. Nearly everything I've wanted to do has been covered somewhere in the book BUT the big problem is finding the information you need.
The index is truly VERY poor e.g several letters have only a single entry - L for example - many others have just a few entries. I could do with a soft copy of the book to search for things more easily. But don't let that put you off, the contents pages are good, and you can always scribble extra entries into the index as you find things!!