jQuery Reference Guide: A Comprehensive Exploration of the Popular JavaScript Library (Paperback)

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Product Description

A Comprehensive Exploration of the Popular JavaScript Library

• Organized menu to every method, function, and selector in the jQuery library
• Quickly look up features of the jQuery library
• Understand the anatomy of a jQuery script
• Extend jQuery's built-in capabilities with plug-ins, and even write your own

In Detail

jQuery is a powerful, yet easy-to-use JavaScript library that helps web developers and designers add dynamic, interactive elements to their sites, smoothing out browser inconsistencies and greatly reducing development time. In this book, the creators of the popular jQuery learning resource, learningquery.com, share their knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm to bring you a comprehensive reference to the popular JavaScript library.

This book offers an organized menu of every jQuery method, function, and selector. Each method and function is introduced with a summary of its syntax and a list of its parameters and return value, followed by a discussion, with examples where applicable, to assist in getting the most out of jQuery and avoiding the pitfalls commonly associated with JavaScript and other client-side languages.

If you're already familiar with JavaScript programming, this book will help you dive right into advanced jQuery concepts. You'll be able to experiment on your own, trusting the pages of this book to provide information on the intricacies of the library, where and when you need it. If you're still hungry for more, the book shows you how to cook up your own extensions with jQuery's elegant plug-in architecture.

This book is a companion to Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques. Learning jQuery begins with a tutorial to jQuery, followed by an examination of common, real-world client-side problems, and solutions for each of them, making it an invaluable resource for answers to all your jQuery questions.

jQuery Reference Guide digs deeper into the library, taking you through the syntax specifications and following up with a detailed discussion. You'll discover the untapped possibilities that jQuery makes available, and hone your skills as you return to this guide time and again.

What you will learn from this book?

• Get a broad overview of the jQuery library's capabilities with a real-world example
• Examine any jQuery method, function, and selector in detail, wherever and whenever it is needed
• Investigate jQuery's plug-in architecture, using a variety of approaches to extend the library's capabilities
• Explore the Dimensions plug-in for getting the size and position of any element on the page--even the document and browser window
• Discover the Form plug-in for combining AJAX techniques with HTML forms

Approach

This book is a detailed reference guide, and an invaluable resource for answers to all your jQuery questions. It begins with a real-world jQuery example, which illustrates the structure of a jQuery script. A detailed reference chapter is then presented for each of the main components of jQuery. The book concludes with three reference chapters on jQuery plug-ins: the API for plug-in creation, the Dimensions plug-in, and the Form plug-in.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for web developers who want a broad, organized view of all the jQuery library has to offer or a quick reference on their desks to refer to for particular details.

The reader needs the basics of HTML and CSS, and should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript, but no knowledge of jQuery is assumed. This is not an introductory title and if you are looking to get started with jQuery (or JavaScript libraries in general) then you are looking for Learning jQuery.

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: 268 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (July 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847193811
• ISBN-13: 978-1847193810
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #352,969 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive jQuery guide - a must have, October 21, 2007

By	Ben Nadel (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just finished reading the jQuery Reference Guide: A Comprehensive Exploration of the Popular JavaScript Library, by PACKT publishing, co-authored by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. This book is fantastic! It's a bit strange to review a reference manual because it's really just listing out all the features of the API. But, it's the way in which this is done that makes this reference guide so effective. Almost every single method and selector is explained in depth with both clear, concise code snippets as well as rendered displays when necessary. Not only did I come away with a wonderful understanding of jQUery API, I also learned more about JavaScript in general (specifically event handling and the XMLHTTPRequest object).

This book is a must have for anyone that is serious about effectively leveraging jQuery in their applications. While the API is very simple, it is also extremely robust and powerful. Even when you think you have a good grasp on how things work, reading a manual like this points out all the little facets that you didn't know existed; whether it be optional method arguments or miscellaneous selectors, you probably aren't writing code as effectively as you could be, and you can't do that until you have at least a general understanding of all the features that jQuery makes available.

One of the great things that this book does, which is rare for an API-style book, is to explain, when possible, what the jQuery API is using behind the scenes to access and traverse the document object model. For instance, it explains that the getElementsByTagName() is used to filter tag-based selectors and that getElementById() is used to filter id-based selectors. While this might not seem important to understand, and after all, the whole point of encapsulation is so that you don't NEED to understand, it can become very useful in terms of optimization. For example, $( "#pagetitle" ) is going to be faster than $( "h1#pagetitle" ) since it can use the direct ID access rather than tag-based filtering. Also, $( "h2.title" ) is going to be faster than $( ".title" ) since it can use the tag-based filtering and not have to iterate over every DOM element looking for a particular class.

In addition to covering the full jQuery API, this book also contains a cursory exploration of the architecture and authoring of custom plug-ins. While the book thoroughly covers basic plug-in authoring, I wish that they had covered some more complex stuff; but, at the same time I think that that probably would be more appropriate for a plug-in based book rather than a general reference manual such as this one.

After discussing plug-in architecture, this book also explores two popular jQuery plug-ins: Dimensions and Form. The dimensions plug-in enhances the built-in height() and width() object methods that already exist. It also introduces a host of other methods that allow developers to find the dimensions and position of elements with the conditional incorporation of various CSS box model properties. The Form plug-in contains many methods that make it super easy to submit a form using AJAX, including many utility methods that assist in the serialization and accessing of form data.

The book does a good job of explaining how the individual Dimensions methods work, especially the height and width related calculations. The position related methods, while explained in depth, left me confused; the demo HTML used in the chapter is explicitly incomplete and this makes it difficult to visualize where the calculated numbers are coming from. It wasn't until I went to the demo site (http://book.learningjquery.com) that the calculations became clear. Even then, however, you can see that as much as the jQuery plug-ins try to encapsulate the cross-browser issues, there are still problems to be found. For example, calling $('div.dim-outer').offset() returned a LEFT value of 580 in FireFox 2.0 and a LEFT value of 1116 in Internet Explorer 6.0.

The book does a good job of explaining how the individual Form plug-in methods work. And, while I am not one who does a lot of AJAX form submission, I can see how using this plug-in would make that a painless process. Regardless, this plug-in also contains some great utility functions that allow you to grab form data at any given time. This can be useful for partial form updates such as the common two-selected-related scenario. My one gripe with this section is the same issue I have throughout the reference manual: callback arguments are not explained very well. With the form submission process, there are two callbacks available - beforeSubmit and success. Both methods are explained in natural language terms, but only the beforeSubmit method gets a code sample explanation (seven pages after it was explained in english). I don't know about you, but seeing a snippet of code is 10 times more clear than the equivalent natural language description.

This is very nit-picky, but as much as I loved this book, there were a few things that were not perfect; while the majority of the selectors are thoroughly explained, the big exception is the Form selectors. I have gone over this section several times and I just can't quite figure out what it means. The big problem is that unlike the rest of the book, the form selectors have no code samples; it's just be a list of input types, but not listed in any meaningful way. This section feels like an afterthought in the book.

I also felt that some of the callback methods could have been better explained. Most of the jQuery callback methods have arguments passed to them, but unless they were used in the examples, they were not defined as part of the callback function definition. I would rather have seen every argument explicitly defined, whether it was used or not, so that we as developers could see what our options were.

The only other problem with this book is that the jQuery technology is evolving so fast that the most recent release of jQuery (v.1.2.1 at the time of this writing) already has things that are not covered in this book. Not only that, a few of the things that are covered in this book, namely the XPath style selectors, are no longer supported by the core jQuery API (but rather though small plug-ins).

Overall though, this book is excellent and I highly recommend it to all web developers, especially those not yet using jQuery so that they can see just how amazing this Javascript library really is. Not only will it teach you all about jQuery, it will probably instill a better understanding of Javascript in general. From me, it gets two thumbs us.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dig deeper into the DOM and AJAX with jQuery, October 23, 2007

By	Donnie Darko - See all my reviews

You might question whether or not a book is even necessary given the wealth of information already available on the jQuery library. I am an avid user of jQuery, semi-active in the community, I have developed a few plug-ins, and I certainly understand the need for this resource guide.

The online documentation is extremely terse, and in order to get an in-depth understanding of the library, a book is necessary. As a programmer I prefer jQuery Resource Guide over Learning jQuery. However, if you are an entry-level interface developer or designer, I might suggest the latter. Either way, you will not be disappointed.

My only complaint with the book, is that it only covers the API. There is no discussion of the jQuery source, and the tactics used to build the library. However, if you want to extend functionality, you will find the chapter on plug-ins very useful. The techniques differ a bit from some of the current jQuery plug-ins, but it is useful nonetheless.

I know there are numerous JavaScript libraries, but I can't say it enough -- this is the one you want to choose, and this is probably the book you want to have on hand when you do decide on jQuery. jQuery Reference Guide is great for helping you to master DOM manipulation, AJAX, and plug-ins, and you will not regret the purchase.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very Useful, December 21, 2007

By	Sean Catchpole "sunsean" (Austin, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have always used online resources for API information since searching is a huge time saver, but online references only delve as deep as a simplistic example often leaving the general purpose and even usefulness of a function unexplained. The jQuery Reference Guide puts those questions to rest and explains how functions work and how supplying various options may change the effect of the function. I found most of the information valuable and an excellent way to quickly learn more about the jQuery library. I am also pleased to see many underused functions like $.grep recieve some attention. I've worked on the jQuery core and UI project. I can attest that both Jonathan and Karl know what they are talking about and do a great job of translating geek into English.