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Learning jQuery
Add to your current website development skills with this brilliant guide to JQuery. This step by step course needs little prior JavaScript knowledge so is suitable for beginners and more seasoned developers alike. Overview In Detail To build interesting, interactive sites, developers are turning to JavaScript libraries such as jQuery to automate common tasks and simplify complicated ones. Because many web developers have more experience with HTML and CSS than with JavaScript, the library's design lends itself to a quick start for designers with little programming experience. Experienced programmers will also be aided by its conceptual consistency. LearningjQuery - Fourth Edition is revised and updated version of jQuery. You will learn the basics of jQuery for adding interactions and animations to your pages. Even if previous attempts at writing JavaScript have left you baffled, this book will guide you past the pitfalls associated with AJAX, events, effects, and advanced JavaScript language features. Starting with an introduction to jQuery, you will first be shown how to write a functioning jQuery program in just three lines of code. Learn how to add impact to your actions through a set of simple visual effects and to create, copy, reassemble, and embellish content using jQuery's DOM modification methods. The book will take you through many detailed, real-world examples, and even equip you to extend the jQuery library itself with your own plug-ins. What you will learn from this book Approach We will step through each of the core concepts of the jQuery library, building an overall picture of its capabilities. Once you have thoroughly covered the basics, the book returns to each concept to cover more advanced examples and techniques. Who this book is written for 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. Basic JavaScript programming and knowledge of HTML and CSS is required. No knowledge of jQuery is assumed, nor is experience with any other JavaScript libraries. Jonathan Chaffer Jonathan Chaffer is a member of Rapid Development Group, a web development firm located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His work there includes overseeing and implementing projects in a wide variety of technologies, with an emphasis in PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript. He also leads on-site training seminars on the jQuery framework for web developers. In the open source community, he has been very active in the Drupal CMS project, which has adopted jQuery as its JavaScript framework of choice. He is the creator of the Content Construction Kit, a popular module for managing structured content on Drupal sites. He is also responsible for major overhauls of Drupal's menu system and developer API reference. He lives in Grand Rapids with his wife, Jennifer.
418 pages, Paperback
First published July 7, 2007
28 people are currently reading
127 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 27, 2019
Even tough I've been using jQuery for nearly three years now, I read this book just to see if there are any gaps in my knowledge of jQuery. And it turned out I was missing on some of the advanced features. The authors did a very good job of explaining jQuery features and intricacies. So, this book can serve both as a thorough introduction into jQuery and a reminder of the capabilities of this library.
One more thing to note, however, is the fact that this book made me realize and appreciate even more what a huge step forward modern frameworks like Angular are in the frontend web programming.
One more thing to note, however, is the fact that this book made me realize and appreciate even more what a huge step forward modern frameworks like Angular are in the frontend web programming.
June 28, 2014
Excellent book!
Learning jQuery is an excellent book, hands down. I enjoyed it immensely and will surely use it frequently to look up things in the future. I reserver 5 star ratings for only few, select books, and Learning jQuery earned every single one of them.
There are several reasons I can praise this book so highly. The code examples, for example, are elegant and concise. Also, the authors make sure to embed the examples they show into real, practical contexts. You're walked through not only typical usages of jQuery, but also some many best practices of web development. If you read this book, you will walk away with a solid understanding of the important concepts of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, and if you do the exercises you'll learn to automatically think of these aspects when designing your next real-life project.
Another reason is that the book is well-written. Although it goes pretty deep into some areas of jQuery, it's easy to understand and supported by solid examples.
And lastly, it's based on a great technology. jQuery is not only an extremely useful library, it's extremely extensive and extensible. Whereas in the first half of the book you learn to work with it, in the second half you learn much more about how to extend it quickly and easily, while still adhering to the API principles that make the library so intuitive and flexible in the first place. jQuery takes advantages of many of the aspects of the JavaScript that make JavaScript stand out among other languages - live prototypes, the ability to use strings as object properties, etc.
While most of the book shows you how to use jQuery to add useful behaviors to your website, relying primarily on jQuery alone as a way of controlling what's going on in the DOM, there are also some very helpful examples on writing JavaScript that not only controls, but also comprehends the DOM elements it interacts with. Such tricks save a lot of maintenance and extensibility woes over the course of projects and I was happy to see them here.
The icing on the cake came in the form of in-depth discourse about AJAX - asynchronously communicating with a server from your website, as well as some very basic examples of how to set up the server-side functionality required to react to such communication intelligently. The book also contains some terse material that is enough to get you started using QUnit, a unit testing framework for JavaScript, so that you can deploy and develop your code with the surety that it works the way you want it to.
All of this content is bound together by the overarching goal of concise, yet understandable code that is easy to maintain and improve. Best practices of development in general and web development in particular are impressed upon the reader without giving being preachy about it. The book has so much material that it took a long time to get through, but it was never tedious and I can recommend it to any intermediate JavaScript user who's wanting to find out how they can best utilize jQuery to get started making beautiful websites.
Learning jQuery is an excellent book, hands down. I enjoyed it immensely and will surely use it frequently to look up things in the future. I reserver 5 star ratings for only few, select books, and Learning jQuery earned every single one of them.
There are several reasons I can praise this book so highly. The code examples, for example, are elegant and concise. Also, the authors make sure to embed the examples they show into real, practical contexts. You're walked through not only typical usages of jQuery, but also some many best practices of web development. If you read this book, you will walk away with a solid understanding of the important concepts of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation, and if you do the exercises you'll learn to automatically think of these aspects when designing your next real-life project.
Another reason is that the book is well-written. Although it goes pretty deep into some areas of jQuery, it's easy to understand and supported by solid examples.
And lastly, it's based on a great technology. jQuery is not only an extremely useful library, it's extremely extensive and extensible. Whereas in the first half of the book you learn to work with it, in the second half you learn much more about how to extend it quickly and easily, while still adhering to the API principles that make the library so intuitive and flexible in the first place. jQuery takes advantages of many of the aspects of the JavaScript that make JavaScript stand out among other languages - live prototypes, the ability to use strings as object properties, etc.
While most of the book shows you how to use jQuery to add useful behaviors to your website, relying primarily on jQuery alone as a way of controlling what's going on in the DOM, there are also some very helpful examples on writing JavaScript that not only controls, but also comprehends the DOM elements it interacts with. Such tricks save a lot of maintenance and extensibility woes over the course of projects and I was happy to see them here.
The icing on the cake came in the form of in-depth discourse about AJAX - asynchronously communicating with a server from your website, as well as some very basic examples of how to set up the server-side functionality required to react to such communication intelligently. The book also contains some terse material that is enough to get you started using QUnit, a unit testing framework for JavaScript, so that you can deploy and develop your code with the surety that it works the way you want it to.
All of this content is bound together by the overarching goal of concise, yet understandable code that is easy to maintain and improve. Best practices of development in general and web development in particular are impressed upon the reader without giving being preachy about it. The book has so much material that it took a long time to get through, but it was never tedious and I can recommend it to any intermediate JavaScript user who's wanting to find out how they can best utilize jQuery to get started making beautiful websites.
June 27, 2017
Pretty good, though, when it comes to more advanced stuff, the details tend to start to get pretty sketchy and it becomes easy to get lost. There are no solutions to the exercises as such, but you can find those online.
April 8, 2012
This is an excellent book for learning -- unlike many other books on programming. It is written in a clear and understandable manner, introducing concepts gradually from simple to complex, without jumping from one subject to another. Each chapter has exercises which help to grasp and memorize information well.
One thing you might find useful, there's a site for the book with code examples, http://book.learningjquery.com/6549/c.... You might find it useful to get HTML and CSS, since the book displays only snippets.
One thing you might find useful, there's a site for the book with code examples, http://book.learningjquery.com/6549/c.... You might find it useful to get HTML and CSS, since the book displays only snippets.
April 30, 2012
a great book to start learning jquery, good examples, realistic problems, and well written. I greatly enjoyed to end of chapter exercises. I only wish it were more comprehensive. It gave me a list of more reading material for the more in depth concepts instead of diving into them.
January 9, 2012
A gentle introduction to jQuery, broken into easy chunks e.g. small chapters. Assumes very little prior knowledge and walks you through each step. Excellent.
January 21, 2013
Good introduction to jQuery, especially the animation and AJAX framework.
April 4, 2017
Awesome book...totally love it...JQuery rocks...and this book is all about JQuery...I'm looking forward to read the fourth edition -;)
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews