Customer Reviews

jQuery Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Expert's Voice in Web Development)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'd been looking forward to this book for quite a while. Imagine my disappointment when I got it and realized many of the "recipes" were pointless. Things like styling a breadcrumb menu with jQuery don't make any sense. I'm having a problem imagining many scenarios where you need to dynamically apply styles to breadcrumbs with javascript instead of just defining them in your stylesheet from the beginning. I mean, the subtitle says "A Problem Solution Approach" but I get the very real feeling that developers relying upon the "Solutions" found in this book are actually creating more Problems for themselves down the road.

This book has woefully too many similar instances where jQuery is used to add an extra layer of complexity to a simpler technique web developers already know. Additionally, many of the examples contain poor coding practices and the validation section is entirely a waste considering the strength and support for the validation plugin. I could go on, but I won't.

I love Apress books and I love jQuery but I'm just confused about what happened with this book!

This butt-ugly volume is the most useful jQuery book I've come across. I paid full price, plus tax, for the print edition, and have not regretted it. It has been ten times more useful than the O'Reilly 'cookbook.' But your needs and mileage may differ. Me, was mostly interested in extensive DOM manipulation for a magazine-site project I was creating. The .toggle, .clone, and .appendTo methods were central to this, and jQuery Recipes served up the proper examples right away, bang-zoom. I've cross-referenced my needs with the O'Reilly book, and the two core guides from Packt Publishing, as well as the Manning book, jQuery in Action; and they all gave helpful backup information, but none of them gave me example nodes that I could comprehend and imitate right away.

This book has a list of jQuery recipes that a web developer can try and use. I found the form validation chapter was useful for the project I was working on and there are recipes for visual effects that I end up found better recipes elsewhere. Depending on what you are looking for, this book can be helpful if you can find the recipes you need. The layout and indexing of this book make your recipe search very easy. This is not a book for absolute jQuery beginners. It is more geared for web developers who has a specific jQuery question or issue to solve. I recommend to scan the table of index prior to get the book since no recipe book can ever include everything.

Don't buy this book! Most of these so called recipes are available online. Not only that, the code has bugs. Code has NOT been tested. How could anyone sell this crap. Nuff said. Save your money. Google is free and you get better results!

jQuery has been around for a few years now and is already pretty much the #1 or #2 JavaScript library used in websites today. You know its gaining popularity when you see all the recent books that have been published on the subject even with the great amount of information on the jQuery website. And since Microsoft is including jQuery support in their next version of Visual Studio (2010), you know it will grow even more. So everybody is jumping in on the jQuery bandwagon.

Of all the books out on jQuery today, most are just paper versions of the online documentation of jQuery website or the tutorial section.

This book is different.

This is one of the very few books that actually goes beyond the basic online tutorials you see online and really goes through the entire gambit of 'real-world' applications for jQuery.

A few examples are:

1. Updating DOM tree elements in complex html layouts
2. Manipulating string and array data (improving JavaScript syntax)
3. Accessing multiple mouse events via listeners
4. All sorts of form element validation
5. Image manipulation (scrolling, moving, toggling, fading, etc.)
6. Manipulating tables
7. Accessing CSS elements and HTML elements

Each chapter has at least 10-20 subsections of useful jQuery techniques that you can apply in a few minutes to your existing webiste no matter what techology you are using behind the scenes. It can be used as a reference book or a learning tool where you read cover to cover. Its really the only jQuery book you'll ever need.

A great buy.