A problem with creating, editing, and maintaining webpages is that the complexity of such pages is continually increasing, and basic knowledge of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), cascading style sheets (CSS), and JavaScript alone is insufficient for creating rich, functional, and attractive content. JQuery is a versatile and small JavaScript library that is extensively used by web developers and substantially addresses these issues. This book is a training manual for jQuery, and assumes a basic knowledge of web technologies and basic programming skills.

It contains 16 chapters divided into five sections. In the first section, four chapters cover the prerequisite understanding of web technologies required by the reader, the subset of JavaScript the book will use, document object model (DOM) scripting with JavaScript, and testing and debugging approaches. This is basic material that should be familiar to most readers; specific topics directly relevant to use of the jQuery libraries are covered in more detail.

The second section discusses the basic jQuery libraries in five chapters, covering essential functionality the user is likely to require: how jQuery interacts with HTML and CSS, simple animations, plugins, forms, and DOM traversal. Section 3 focuses on more advanced interfaces, and Section 4 explains how jQuery interfaces with the Ajax and JSON technologies and with general HTML5 application programming interfaces (APIs). The final section considers the issues that affect the use of jQuery when used to present content to mobile devices.

There are three appendices that explain how to download and install the publisher’s resources (including source code for the examples), a list of the applications presented in the book, and a short explanation of how the $ (dollar) symbol can ease problems with some installations of jQuery (and how to fix them). A comprehensive index concludes the book.

I was puzzled by the authors’ recommendation of Aptana as the editor of choice. Judging by reviews of Aptana, it is a good open-source product, but it is not yet well known; the book only discusses using it on Windows and Mac platforms (although many users are likely to be developing on a Linux platform). More concerning is the fact that the most recent release of Aptana is nearly two years old; the product has been acquired by another corporation, and little (if any) development work has taken place since mid-2014. The book would benefit from a more extensive discussion of alternative development environments.

Overall, this is a good book. It is well written and easy to follow, and the examples are easy to download (from the publisher’s website), edit, and test. As with many books that are tutorials for a specific technology, there are prerequisites; these are clearly stated, but the user would be unwise to commence reading the book without understanding them. The book positions itself as suitable for a programmer without specific experience in web programming, and covers the technologies and concepts required in chapter 1. As a “refresher course,” this is fine, but I found the initial discussion much too rapid for a reader who genuinely had not encountered web technologies before. This is not a substitute for a textbook on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

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