Web Designers' Review of Books

This book is an excellent guide to the powerful, designer-friendly Javascript library JQuery.

This book is superior to the other JQuery book I’ve reviewed, JQuery In Action, for a couple of reasons:

• The examples in the book are more applicable to real-world projects. One of the very first code examples, demonstrating the wide variety of selectors available in JQuery, shows how you might select and style all email links. A simple thing, but something you can plug right into a working project.
• The examples are more extended and developed, rather than small and isolated. Throughout Chapter 3, which focuses on events, the authors develop a style switcher, improving on it as new concepts are introduced.

Not Perfect

As with so many coding books, the index on this thing is abominable. hover: no entry. fadeIn: no entry. Those are basic JQuery favorites (fyi: hover is introduced on page 47, fadeIn and fadeOut on page 64). There is an entry for “curreny, formatting” however…a typo for “currency, formatting”, which you’ll find on page 235.

This may seem like a minor complaint, but it really makes using the book as a reference tool unnecessarily difficult.

Conclusion

This book is definitely worth buying to help you get started with JQuery and improve your skills. A better index would make it a much more valuable reference.

View Learning JQuery on Amazon.