jQuery in Action | 
 enlarge | Authors: Bear Bibeault, Yehuda Katz
Creator: John Resig
Publisher: Manning Publications
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  21 reviews
Sales Rank: 4120
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 376
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 1933988355
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
EAN: 9781933988351
ASIN: 1933988355
Publication Date: February 7, 2008
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Product Description
A good web development framework anticipates what you need to do and makes those tasks easier and more efficient; jQuery practically reads your mind. Developers of every stripe-hobbyists and professionals alike-fall in love with jQuery the minute they've reduced 20 lines of clunky JavaScript into three lines of elegant, readable code. This new, concise JavaScript library radically simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery in Action, like jQuery itself, is a concise tool designed to make you a more efficient and effective web developer. In a short 300 pages, this book introduces you to the jQuery programming model and guides you through the major features and techniques you'll need to be productive immediately. The book anchors each new concept in the tasks you'll tackle in day-to-day web development and offers unique lab pages where you immediately put your jQuery knowledge to work. There are dozens of JavaScript libraries available now, with major companies like Google, Yahoo and AOL open-sourcing their in-house tools. This book shows you how jQuery stacks up against other libraries and helps you navigate interaction with other tools and frameworks. jQuery in Action offers a rich investigation of the up-and-coming jQuery library for client-side JavaScript. This book covers all major features and capabilities in a manner focused on getting the reader up and running with jQuery from the very first sections. Web Developers reading this book will gain a deep understanding of how to use jQuery to simplify their pages and lives, as well as learn the philosophy behind writing jQuery-enhanced pages.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 16 more reviews...
 Good Book on JQuery November 22, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Good book on jquery. I bought the book to learn jquery and it provide all I needed to port a PHP web based application of .NET using jquery and some of the plug-in to create a professional web site for a major health entity.
A very good book on jQuery November 20, 2008
jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz is an excellent book for learning the jQuery JavaScript library. In my opinion the book is suitable for beginners as well as advanced developers that like to explore jQuery. It is also a good reference book as it describes all the essential functionality offered by jQuery in a nicely structured manner.
I belong to the category of developers that used Prototype in the past. The funny thing is though that both libraries offer almost identical sets of functionality. You may ask why did I decide to go with jQuery?
I like its innovative way of querying for page elements and to iterated over them, allowing you to often accomplish multiple tasks with just one line of code. jQuery in Action starts out explaining those core concepts of jQuery in the first 3 chapters of the book - allowing to query for page elements using the CSS syntax, how to manipulate page elements as well as how to work with collections of elements. The book does a very good job explaining those aspects of jQuery combined with many useful examples.
What also drove me to jQuery was the fact that it has a plug-in mechanism that allows you to either use additional third party add-ons or to write your own plug-ins by still adhering to the spirit of jQuery.
In that regard it is also worth mentioning that the jQuery website is "really nice" with a ton of documentation and also providing a plugin-repository, something Prototype is lacking. Thus, for the majority of your JavaScript needs, there is now a one-stop place to get it all.
Unfortunately, the authors do not provide a comparison between both wildly popular javascript libraries Prototype and jQuery even though Bear Bibeault has been a coauthor of Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action. It would have been nice if chapter '1.1 Why jQuery' detailed some pros and cons in that respect.
Generally, throughout the book, the authors encourage certain valuable patterns you should follow to write good unobtrusive JavaScript code using jQuery. I particularly liked that aspect of the book as it shows you efficiently how to separate page markup from JavaScript code.
In that regard it would have been nice, though, if the authors had mentioned YSlow as another tool to analyze your page markup, which includes the recommendation to place JavaScript at the bottom of your page rather then on the top, if possible.
Anyway, there shouldn't be any need to declared the onclick attributed on page elements directly any longer. It all can be separated using JavaScript events which is well described in the book.
Speaking of handling JavaScript events, I think the authors should have further mentioned the concept of event delegation. Instead, they describe how to use the Live Query plugin in order to solve a similar issue. After reading the respective chapter, I was going to further dive into Live Query but a fellow blogger pointed out NOT to use Live Query as "it is very performance heavy" but rather to use event delegation.
I guess this is a drawback writing a book about a subject that is evolving with the speed of light.
Nevertheless, despite all my critical remarks, I think that jQuery in Action is an excellent book that will help you learn and understand jQuery. I certainly enjoyed reading the book.
 Review November 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book provided me the needed information to be able to use JQuery practically and efficiently.
excellent source for jquery October 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have committed myself to using jquery exclusively for my javascript applications but not much is written about it so it is difficult to solve problems. This book answered a lot of my questions and cleared up many difficulties. I use it as a reference whenever I am stuck. Thank you for writing it.
Good, but just a hair thin October 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a really nice book on jquery. I've been using jQuery on a few projects, but this really helped point me to several things I could be doing better. All too often you find yourself following a tutorial blindly, without full understanding. This book set a few of my "tutorial assumptions" straight.
I only wish it had a little more meat to it. I think it's just a matter of a few things I'd hoped to find not being there though. Definitely suggest this book if you're serious about messing with jQuery in a real project.
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