Learning jQuery 1.3 [Paperback]

Jonathan Chaffer (Author), Karl Swedberg (Author), John Resig (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 13, 2009

Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

• An introduction to jQuery that requires minimal programming experience
• Detailed solutions to specific client-side problems
• For web designers to create interactive elements for their designs
• For developers to create the best user interface for their web applications
• Packed with great examples, code, and clear explanations
• Revised and updated version of the first book to help you learn jQuery

In Detail

To build interesting, interactive sites, developers are turning to JavaScript libraries such as jQuery to automate common tasks and simplify complicated ones. Because many web developers have more experience with HTML and CSS than with JavaScript, the library's design lends itself to a quick start for designers with little programming experience. Experienced programmers will also be aided by its conceptual consistency.

Revised and updated for version 1.3 of jQuery, this book teaches you the basics of jQuery for adding interactions and animations to your pages. Even if previous attempts at writing JavaScript have left you baffled, this book will guide you past the pitfalls associated with AJAX, events, effects, and advanced JavaScript language features.

In this book, the authors share their knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm about jQuery to help you get the most from the library and to make your web applications shine. The book introduces jQuery and shows how you can write a functioning jQuery program in just three lines of code. It then guides you through CSS selectors and shows how to enhance the basic event handling mechanisms to give them a more elegant syntax. You will then learn to add impact to your actions through a set of simple visual effects and also to create, copy, reassemble, and embellish content using jQuery's DOM modification methods. You will also learn to send and retrieve information with AJAX methods. The book will then step you through many detailed, real-world examples and even equip you to extend the jQuery library itself with your own plug-ins.

What you will learn from this book?

This book will give you the tools you need to be on the cutting edge of the web development community. With these techniques at your disposal, you can:

• Use selectors to get anything you want from a page
• Make things happen on your page with events
• Add flair to your actions with animation effects
• Change your page on command with DOM manipulation
• Use AJAX to get the most out of server-side code
• Transform drab, static information containers into beautiful, dynamic tables
• Breathe new life into online forms
• Create dynamic shufflers, rotators, and galleries
• Get started with official jQuery plug-ins
• Customize by writing your own jQuery plug-ins

Approach

This book begins with a tutorial to jQuery, followed by an examination of common, real-world client-side problems, and solutions to each of them making it an invaluable resource for answers to all your jQuery questions.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for web designers who want to create interactive elements for their designs, and for developers who want to create the best user interface for their web applications. Basic JavaScript programming knowledge is required. You will need to know the basics of HTML and CSS, and should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript. No knowledge of jQuery is assumed, nor is experience with any other JavaScript libraries required.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jonathan Chaffer

Jonathan Chaffer is the Chief Technology Officer of Structure Interactive, an interactive agency located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There he oversees web development projects using a wide range of technologies, and continues to collaborate on day-to-day programming tasks as well.

In the open-source community, Jonathan has been very active in the Drupal CMS project, which has adopted jQuery as its JavaScript framework of choice. He is the creator of the Content Construction Kit, a popular module for managing structured content on Drupal sites. He is responsible for major overhauls of Drupal's menu system and developer API reference.

Jonathan lives in Grand Rapids with his wife, Jennifer.

Karl Swedberg

Karl Swedberg is a web developer at Structure Interactive in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he spends much of his time implementing design with a focus on "web standards"--semantic HTML, well-mannered CSS, and unobtrusive JavaScript.

Before his current love affair with web development, Karl worked as a copy editor, a high-school English teacher, and a coffee house owner. His fascination with technology began in the early 1990s when he worked at Microsoft in Redmond, Washington, and it has continued unabated ever since.

Karl's other obsessions include photography, karate, English grammar, and fatherhood. He lives in Grand Rapids with his wife, Sara, and his two children, Benjamin and Lucia.

Product Details

• Paperback: 444 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing; 2nd edition edition (February 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847196705
• ISBN-13: 978-1847196705
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.9 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #645,293 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introduction to JQuery and client-side scripting March 6, 2009

By Allan Metts

Format:Paperback

I'm a programmer with lots of experience in several languages, although I never learned JavaScript -- nor had I done client-side web programming outside of static (X)HTML and CSS.

I decided it was time to close this gap, so I chose JQuery as my framework to abstract away the headaches I'd heard about JavaScript, and I chose Learning jQuery 1.3 as my means to learn the platform.

The book provides an excellent tour of jQuery's capabilities, although the jQuery UI package is not covered (the publisher offers this in a different book).

Each chapter covers a different aspect of jQuery programming, starting with simple examples and finishing with complex/completed functionality. Since this was my first dive into browser-side programming, I also found the book to be an excellent overview for creating the various behaviors I'd seen in practice (such as animating web content, validating forms, and refreshing data without refreshing the page).

New concepts are introduced along the way, and potential "gotchas" are exposed by presenting them as what you think you'd do next -- but are then followed by an explanation as to why it's the wrong thing to do. The book also contains an overview of many of the more popular jQuery plug-ins.

You're best off downloading the accompanying source code if you want to try the examples yourself, because non-relevant portions of the code and accompanying CSS don't always appear in the text. My only complaint lies with the example code: It isn't always well-commented. jQuery's syntax and extensive chaining can sometimes be non-intuitive, so good commenting is a must in a book like this.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must-Read March 7, 2009

By Nathan Smith

Format:Paperback

It's been nearly two years since the first edition of Learning jQuery was published. In my review of the initial version, I highly recommended it to anyone wanting to learn more about jQuery. I am quite pleased to say that this update is equally as good, bringing the reader up to speed on all the improvements that have been made since. Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer have masterfully refined the examples in Learning jQuery 1.3 to reflect the latest code base.

If you are still on the fence about delving into jQuery, know that there are a lot of successful companies who are using it already, such as those listed on the jQuery home page: CBS, Dell, Digg, Google, NBC, Netflix, WordPress -- to name a few. Additionally, Microsoft has made jQuery their JavaScript library of choice, for the upcoming .NET MVC framework -- which is somewhat akin to Ruby on Rails.

It is no secret that I am a huge fan of jQuery. In fact, I recently wrote a chapter for an upcoming jQuery book by O'Reilly. Believe me when I say that Karl really knows jQuery and is one of the brightest developers I know. This is a book not to be missed, especially if you are going to frequently be writing JavaScript.

One of the most notable improvements has been in the speed of CSS style selectors. Rather than doing a top-down pass at elements, the latest version of jQuery finds things via a bottom-up approach called Sizzle. This is similar to the way browsers apply stylesheets, and allows jQuery to be significantly faster.

Another key improvement, one that did not exist before, is the addition of "live" effects. Essentially, this allows you to add event listeners on any currently existing elements in a page, as well as all future elements that match the criteria. This means that parts of a page dynamically updated via Ajax can also have enriched interactivity, without calling additional functions to re-parse the page. Under the hood, this is done via abstracted event delegation.

Another thing that has changed since the original book is that "toggle" can now handle two or more functions, cycled through, rather than being limited to only two, as was the case with older versions of jQuery. This means that a single element can be the trigger for an unlimited events throughout a page.

Without specifically calling out every nuance that has been improved upon, suffice it to say that jQuery has continuously been refined and tuned for speed and browser compatibility over the past few years. Enough so, that even if you have the first edition, getting the latest version of this book will greatly benefit your development team, or even you as an individual if you work as a freelancer.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Lot's of information, but NOT for the beginner programmer! June 21, 2010

By M York

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm not one to write reviews here very often - this only is my second. But I feel strongly enough about how this book's content is presented that I had to come here and hopefully prevent some disappointed purchases.

I personally learn best by doing something - seeing a working example and then taking it apart and observing what changing something does.

This book is not very good for that. The code in the text is presented in blocks and snippets of code. There is sample code you can download, but it is all completed code after being altered through the end of the relevant chapter. The code I've looked at in the sample downloads looks NOTHING like what you see in the book.

The writers go to great lengths explaining about each new concept, but again, the example to show how the concept works is presented in a snippet and the reader is left to figure out how to add that to the existing code that has been written thus far in the chapter.

It is because of this that I DO NOT recommend this book to the beginning developer. I am at an intermediate level of programming myself and have spent way too much time trying to figure out how to add the code presented in the book to what has already been written.

There are even inconsistencies in code from one block to the next when a new concept is added. Case in point: if you have the book, compare the code on page 57 to the code it is supposed to be based on, on page 55. Whether the difference is a typo, or failure to explain the difference in code, I can't tell. Hence I spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to add the new concept into the existing code myself.

Much of my dislike for the book is based on person learning style, but I think the writers could do a better job in providing more useful, in-context, working code.