Murach’s JavaScript and jQuery is about giving essential knowledge and tools to a programmer to build web clients using JavaScript and jQuery. The book covers and details the most basic usages of JavaScript and jQuery. The techniques presented in the book will help users design robust web forms using jQuery user interface (UI) widgets.

The book is well written and adequately structured to meet its objectives. It provides a gentle and well-assisted introduction to web programming, JavaScript, and jQuery. People with little knowledge in these topics will, hopefully, feel safely guided thanks to its many examples and descriptive illustrations.

Numerous examples are presented, most of which are self-contained: it is rare when one has to jump a few pages back to have a complete runnable example. Examples are based very much on processing forms, images, document object model (DOM) elements, and jQuery UI widgets.

The book is physically well structured. Left-hand pages contain theoretical explanations and descriptions while right-hand pages contain code, examples, and short summaries. Each chapter comes with a perspective section, a list of terms, a brief summary, and some exercises. Such a structure supports different reading speeds.

A practical stance is taken from the beginning. For example, I greatly appreciated chapter 5, which is about testing and debugging a JavaScript application. The authors take care to provide the essential tooling to avoid frustrating situations resulting from incorrect application behavior.

Novice or inexperienced web programmers will enjoy the step-by-step guidance given at the beginning. The examples and descriptions provided are essentially about building web forms and applications with few possible interactions. The book is therefore not for programmers who are looking for different kinds of JavaScript applications. In particular, the book is not for developers using JavaScript for the server side. The book looks particularly suitable for an audience of nonexperts in programming and those with little knowledge about web programming.

It does not cover the topic of good programming rules (for example, using design patterns) and managing large JavaScript applications (for example, it does not cover JavaScript modules systems). Instead, the book is designed to guide programmers in making short applications. The third section of the book covers the most advanced topics; however, experienced programmers may find few surprises in it.

I enjoyed this book thanks to its clarity and ease of reading. It will definitely be a good read for those willing to learn client-side web programming from scratch.

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