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Beyond jQuery
Nicholus R., Apress, New York, NY, 2016. 217 pp. Type: Book (978-1-484222-34-8)
Date Reviewed: Sep 28 2017

Beyond jQuery was a unique book to review. I enjoyed almost every page, yet disagree with the book’s apparent purpose, as presented in the first few chapters. But just as I was prepared to write a scathingly ambivalent review, the author redeemed himself with some conciliatory remarks in the final pages of the book.

The overall goal of this book is an argument that jQuery is not needed. JavaScript programmers coding for modern browsers (circa 2016) should express everything in terms of primitives.

Nicholus fails in this attempt. Too many of his examples seem fragile, too dependent on today’s browser climate, or much more verbose than the equivalent jQuery code. But he does succeed in a milder form: he shows that programmers can (versus should) express everything without jQuery.

The first three chapters of the book are background. They present the history of jQuery and browsers, and argue strongly for the importance of understanding jQuery’s underpinnings. I do agree with many of the author’s points, but he goes too far in his rants against jQuery.

There certainly are some situations where this is true, but the case here is far overstated. Fortunately, as I mentioned above, the final pages of the book offer a milder version of this argument, concede that it is usually okay to use jQuery, and generally speaking are a much more reasonable read.

Despite my discomfort with the book’s motivation, I like the content very much. Nicholus does a beautiful job of presenting actions that can be done with the jQuery library, and showing source code to complete the same actions without jQuery. He also links to a GitHub project illustrating these techniques in a complete implementation.

Areas covered by the book include element selection, attributes, data storage and retrieval, styles, document object model (DOM) manipulation, Ajax, browser events, async operations, and utility functions.

This book is worth reading by anyone who’d like an overview of the plumbing behind jQuery, or who wants to dive into ways of accomplishing tasks with jQuery.

More reviews about this item: Amazon

Reviewer:  David Goldfarb Review #: CR145567 (1712-0768)
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