jQuery, jQuery UI, and jQuery Mobile are thoroughly covered in this encyclopedic book. It is a fine reference but probably not enough to teach the language from scratch. The one question I have is whether this reference format is still as useful today, with so many online resources available to programmers.
The book starts with a lightning review of JavaScript, Extensible Markup Language (XML), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), web services, the jQuery components, and Eclipse. Chapter 2 then gives a more detailed guide to JavaScript, followed by an explanation of the document object model (DOM) and jQuery primitives. This chapter goes into much more detail than the material in chapter 1. Both are well done, but I don’t understand why they were separated like this.
Chapters 3 through 12 are the meat of the book, with many, many topics presented as brief problems, each answered with one to two pages of a solution and “how it works” information.
Each topic is presented in a consistent and standardized manner. The problem is one short paragraph. The solution gives a code fragment, typically a jQuery call, and documents each of the arguments. It then gives a longer sample: a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) page with inline JavaScript/jQuery. At the expense of slight verbosity, each page is complete and standalone, including everything needed like the <head> and <script src...> lines. (While this is a bit repetitive, it is very appropriate for the style of this book, where each solution must be complete.)
In total, there are about 160 problems and solutions, with topics including jQuery selectors, filtering, DOM traversal and manipulation, event handling, effects and animation, AJAX, jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, and jQWidgets.
The book ends with four appendices covering HTML5 and CSS3; the web console in each of the common browsers; deployment; and logging, error handling, and debugging. These appendices discuss many significant browser-specific differences, something that jQuery wonderfully lets the rest of the book ignore.
The index is good, but not entirely comprehensive. It has, I estimate, about 700 entries including some duplicates. The average reader will typically do better looking at the detailed table of contents.
The book had a few typographical errors, none of which have major effects on readability.
All in all, I was pleased by this book. It covers jQuery thoroughly and accurately. The topics are organized in an intuitive manner, and it was easy to find answers to the questions I tried.
The bigger question is whether this kind of book still makes sense in today’s age of development guided by Internet search. Very few readers will devour this book cover-to-cover; most will open it only to find answers to specific questions.
Is this faster than a Google search? Often not. However, the book’s organization does add value. Often, related topics would show themselves in the table of contents as I browsed for an answer.
I will probably still use Google search for most of my quick questions while coding, but I will keep this book on my desk for an occasional deep dive.
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