Customer Reviews

jQuery in Action, Second Edition

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

These comments (and the star rating) are very specifically from the point of view of someone who wants to add some interactivity and AJAX to web pages using the most straightforward efficient method, which is with JQuery.

THE GOOD: These guys absolutely know JQuery and JavaScript. They are fluent experts and authorities. They know the minute details and the inner guts. Also, they put a great deal of effort into this book. They built some good downloadable learning tools for the early sections and thought about the organization of the material.

THE BAD: Too few examples. Often complex commands are introduced without even an example to illustrate the syntax.
(FOR EXAMPLE, early on when selectors are discussed, they introduce a selector that requires quotes. That selector itself must be contained in quotes. They never show how the quotes within quotes syntax is handled).

The examples that are included are often not simple or straightforward. To illustrate AJAX their example gratuitously includes a custom plugin. I'd much rather have more examples of variations of the AJAX calls in the AJAX section instead of one long clunky example that illustrates only limited cases of the various jQuery Ajax methods. In several cases, The most complex JQuery method with more than a dozen possible parameters is simply listed with the parameters barely explained with no examples at all. Maybe if I was a professional JavaScript programmer a lot of the left out stuff would be trivial or obvious. But it wasn't for me.

In other places there is a surfeit of unnecessary technical material. The chapter on events, for example, starts off with long sections on the DOM event model and cross browser issues without a HINT that those issues aren't material to the JQuery user (that's the point! JQuery handles that stuff so I don't need to know).

Stylistically, these guys seem to be inspired either by ad copy (there is a ridiculous excess of exclamations!) or by programming blogs. They have the a fondness for jargon and dogma that seems to be the morass of the self-educated technophile. Many pages are wasted with examples of How HORRIBLE it was in the days before jQuery. In some sections (like the beginning of the AJAX section) they elaborate on the complexities of browser differences for AJAX calls. One of the most complicated sections in the book, only to show that you really don't need to know any of that stuff thanks to The Miracle of jQuery! (!))

INTERNET EXPLORER: As far as these guys are concerned, Internet Explorer is a bastard stepchild marginal fringe case. They seem embarrassed and appalled that they have to mention it within their pristine pages. OK. They don't like it. But more than half the browsers out there are IE and IE 8 continues to have its own quirks and not follow standards. DEAL WITH IT. JQuery itself has very much code dedicated to sorting out IE issues. It would be nice if the authors would hit that issue head on. A simple list of the various things you can do with JQuery that fix previous browser difficulties that required different code (CSS properties or JavaScript DOM issues) would be nice. Dealing with Internet Explorer hassles (and cross browser hassles in general) is one of the great gifts of JQuery.
Marginalizing that gift because of a distaste for the major browser (like it or not) just is not helpful. I'm not saying they deny the existence of IE. They just don't make it a focus at any point.

FIREBUG: The authors wait till quite late in the book and then treat it as a sort of aside. Firebug is THE javascript debugger for Firefox. The authors (in their brief aside) acknowledge that no one should be writing anything in JavaScript (and so, in jQuery) without using a debugger. Firebug is a fantastic learning tool for jQuery and makes the downloadable "lab" pages the authors provide more or less unnecessary. Since the authors clearly use Firebug themselves and acknowledge how useful and important it is, why do they barely give it a mention? I bet they used it when they were learning jQuery.

I don't like giving a book like this which clearly shows the earmarks of expertise and hard work a negative review. It may be the best JQuery book out there (I haven't read any others yet), but this book seriously needs some editing. Either that or I am simply the wrong audience. I do believe a professional JavaScript programmer would get more out of this than I did.
But in any event, the book should decide if it wants to be a reference, a tutorial, or both. I just think it's not a great introduction to a great subject. And I know it's a lousy reference, because I tried to go back to some chapters to look up syntax. Hard to find. Hard to read. And few examples.

Here's why I gave this book a 5-star rating

1. I was new to JQuery, and they did a fantastic job of explaining it in very simple terms, without muddling it with unwanted details (like you try to pick up a new technology and wham! - you're hit with a dozen other related technologies that you don't care about right now)
2. Each chapter builds on the previous one.
3. When you get to Events, they've done a fantastic job of explaining the inner workings of JavaScript in the appendix. This makes understanding JQuery events a lot easier.
4. The examples are great. Where possible, the authors talk about real world situations.

One thing I'd improve on

1. Some topics are discussed too much in detail. For a beginner wanting to get his/her hands dirty with code, there's way too much covered. This is good if someone wants to build a rich client interface application, but an overkill when a majority of us are looking to enhance our website and cut down on javascript code. But again, there's not one book that can satisfy everyone, and I'll take the extra details anytime, than a poorly written book.

My advice: If you are a novice with JQuery, but this book.

I've been using JavaScript for years, and have worked with other JavaScript libraries, but needed to learn jQuery. After reading this book, I found jQuery intuitive, and easy to work with. I can't advise how it would work for someone less comfortable with JavaScript.

The second thing to rate about a book is whether it sits on the shelf after you have read it, or whether it is still useful. While not organized as a reference, I find myself frequently going back to the book. I can usually find what I am looking for in seconds, and it is often more helpful than the jQuery website.

With the title jQuery in Action, you'd think it'd be a hands on learning experience 'in action'. Not so, I'm on page 66 and I've seen disconnected snippets of code but no real tutorial or project. I've probably written less than 20 of these random snippets. A lot of theory but not much practice (read 'action'). I'm struggling to get through all the wordy explanations of what jQuery can do, methods, arguments and so on. A great example of a programming book that really is hands on and in action is Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial for instance. The latter takes you through a number of projects from start to finish and it extracts the theory from the practice.

I just switched to jQuery Novice to Ninja because I couldn't take it anymore. It's way more concrete using a fictitious website as a foundation for jQuery and great code examples along the way.

If you want to learn jQuery, you are not going to find a better book -- PERIOD.

I had also purchased MVC 2 In Action, and I have been extraordinarily impressed by the quality of this publication. So much so, that In Action will be my top choice for a subject specific manual. I have a computer science degree and it wastes my time when someone spends half of a book rehashing the fundamentals of almost all programming languages as they plod along with the most simplistic examples; demonstrating that they do not have a strong understanding of the subject matter. Conversely, many authors will get over their head and skip steps, or they do not provide the the conceptual guidance which would allow you to move beyond their meager examples....This is NOT one of those books.

For MVC2 it was incredibly helpful that their was great sourcecode for every chapter, and for jQuery In Action, they have done an amazing job with the their Lab and Code supplemental. This was critical and a tremendous resource!

A couple of minor points:

1) I would have liked to see a chapter or two dedicated to discussing what is going on under the hood with a dive into the actual jquery.js library. I find that having a better sense of the architecture and reasons behind the architectural decisions allows me to have greater intuition when I am working outside of my normal domain.

I am fairly new to Web Programming and have limited knowledge of Javascript, and so it would have been interesting (and useful) to better understand how jQuery could have been written from Javascript in the first place so that maybe we would have a better sense of what is going on under the hood as we begin to experiment.

2) I would love for them to do a full book on jQuery UI. In particular, I would like to see a deep dive which starts with a VERY simple widget and progressively adds layers of core functionality and flexibility while providing guidance on best practices and architectural considerations.

3) It would be great if they kept an online list of Gotchyas and potential resolutions.

But don't let this deter you -- these are more for advanced use and there is always the chance that they could produce an advanced book that picks up where this one left off.

Read a little, code a little. That was my experience. I caught myself saying, "Wow, I want to try that" on almost every page. If you don't feel like writing your own code, the book authors provide samples that you can download from manning.com/jQueryinActionSecondEdition. This was a great book to learn jQuery. Even though while I'm writing this review, jQuery has come out with a new version, the book's content is still relevant.

jQuery in Action is an excellent book. Many Javascript programmers have cited it as "excellent", and it will invariably come up if you Google for "best jquery book":

[...]

It's *not* intended for people who aren't already familiar with Javascript.

The on-line jQuery documentation is good - and it keeps getting better. And there's plenty of jQuery sample code on the Internet for people who can't be bothered with "theory".

But for those like myself who want a book that explains the "why's" and the "how's", this book is arguably THE go-to book for jQuery.

Very, very highly recommended.

If you know javascript, and you want to learn how to use JQuery, this is the book to read. It is well-written and thorough. The examples are clear and understandable. I highly recommend it.

I also purchased the JQuery 1.4 Reference Guide by Swedberg and Chaffer, which is NOT the book to read to learn JQuery, but which is an excellent reference book once you do. Start with JQuery in Action by Bibeault and Katz, and keep the JQuery 1.4 Reference Guide on your desk while you program.

has surrounded this book. There is noway this book deserves anything more than 2 stars - it is confusing, lacking in examples, and the quality of explanation and description is terrible. The jquery website API is far more explanatory and much less expensive.

I don't know what else to say, this book is Awesome! I'd been looking for book to take the plunge into jQuery; this was definitely the right choice! Excellent, Excellent, Excellent. Can't believe all that time I spent on the jQuery sidelines. Being able to right such elegant yet powerful code puts me in spiritual coding bliss.

Each & every jQuery developer should own a copy of jQuery in Action.