The book is a detailed reference guide, and an invaluable resource for answers to all your queries about jQuery. It is intended to be a quick reference to help at times when you need to quickly confirm a feature of the library. This book is for you if you are a web developer who wants a broad, organized view of all that jQuery library has to offer or a quick reference on their desk to refer to for particular details. Basic knowledge of HTML and CSS is required. You should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript,but no knowledge of jQuery is assumed. This is a reference guide, not an introductory title and if you are looking to get started with jQuery 1.3 (or JavaScript libraries in general) then you are looking for the companion title Learning jQuery 1.3.
jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide
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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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book,
This review is from: jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide (Paperback)
I recently read through the newest revision of Karl and Jonathon's amazing jQuery reference manual, which has just been updated for the latest release of the jQuery library itself. Even though it's a reference manual used to refer to specific methods or properties of the library rather than a teaching book that takes the reader on a journey through the API I still wanted to read through it in its entirety in order to give it a balanced review and to see how much additional information it provided. I'm already fairly competent in using jQuery so I wanted to see if there was anything new it could show me. It did - there were subtle aspects to a number of methods that I had never used before, and with the new additions to the guide added for jQuery 1.4, there was actually a lot I took away from this book.
The first chapter served as a very good general introduction to jQuery and what the library is capable of. The whole chapter is dedicated to an interactive example that uses a wide variety of different jQuery methods and functionality, and the accompanying text gradually picks apart all of the code to show what it does. The example is excellent for those new to jQuery and was a very good way to start the book. After the initial example-based chapter the book switches tone to more of a reference style guide; chapter 2 is a very detailed, quite lengthy chapter that covers all of the different types of selectors that can be used to select elements from the DOM. Many different selectors, including advanced ones like the different types of attribute selectors are covered. Remaining chapters look at the different types of methods that are exposed by the library; there is a chapter dedicated to DOM traversal methods, another that looks at AJAX-related methods, etc. Helpfully, the book is structured similarly to the online documentation so readers should be able to easily find the method they require information about without too much difficulty. Towards the end of the book there are chapters that look at the miscellaneous methods such as .grep(), .unique(), etc which don't fit neatly into any of the other categories, and the different properties of the jQuery object that can give us extra information about the environment that the library is executing in such as the .browser properties. These last chapters will be of huge importance to many developers that are familiar with some of the more common methods, but less familiar with some of these lesser-used methods and properties. There is also a chapter dedicated to the construction of jQuery plugins; the authors didn't have to include an entire chapter on this topic as it is sometimes seen as beyond the scope of general jQuery usage. They could have just included some basic information under the miscellaneous chapter perhaps, but they didn't, they provided a whole chapter to it because the topic deserves a whole chapter. It's a relatively short chapter, and the example plugins are very light, but it covers all of the essentials for plugin development such as the standard conventions, the object method and global functions, so this chapter adds a lot of value. The book also features some potentially very useful appendices including lists of useful tools for JS developers such as code minifiers and browser development tools, information about where to find useful JavaScript, (X)HTML and CSS references as well as a complete alphabetical listing of every jQuery method and property. Overall, I found this an excellent reference book for developers of all levels and would recommend it to anyone that was serious about jQuery development. Bear in mind that it is a reference manual opposed to a recipe-style example-based book, so the style is very concise and sometimes dry. Personally I think this was a good thing as it allowed the book to remain focused on the core topics without going off on a tangent about implementational specifics that the reader may never encounter. It's highly accessible, very information-heavy and literally covers every single method and property found in the library. This book will stay on my desktop (my real, actual desk) for some time to come and will remain my first point of contact from now on when looking up any method of the library. My one complaint is that some of the appendix items from previous versions of the book seem to have been removed; for example, there is an information box in one chapter which states `An in-depth discussion of closures can be found in Appendix C of the book Learning jQuery 1.3. I'm sure many people buying the 1.4 version of the book won't already have the previous edition so this is not helpful in any way. Leaving this non-essential but related information in the book would have been far better. Sometimes however, due to the limits that are placed on page count by publishers, old, less-related information has to be removed. It's not a massive complaint, and I can understand why the authors may have had to remove these extras to make room for information relating to all the cool new functionality of jQuery, but I think the book would have benefited from retaining this information if at all possible.
2.0 out of 5 stars
jquery.com is a better reference. save your money.,
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This review is from: jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide (Paperback)
I consider myself an intermediate level programmer. I can typically pick up a language pretty well by looking at examples and following documentations. I bought this book and jQuery Cookbook to dive into jQuery for my own website. After spending an hour with this book, I decided to return it. While the title did tell me it is a reference guide, I was hoping with its stellar reviews that it would at least provide some useful tips or real world examples.
Sadly, it didn't do a good job of that. I think jquery.com's documentation is far superior to this book. jquery.com was more complete, has tons of examples, and even has a community forum and comments where you can get help. So while this book delivered to what its title promised, I have to say there are better reference guides out there that are free and that won't go out of date in a few years. But if you need basically need jquery.com documentation on the jquery library printed onto a book. This is for you. While not every review has to be a verified purchase to be trustworthy, having none doesn't help. I should have considered that before buying.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent reference,
This review is from: jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide (Paperback)
Disclaimer: I received a digital review copy of this book from the publisher, Packt Publishing.
I can't figure out anything negative to say about jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide. It probably serves best those already familiar with jQuery. Its explanations are clear and terse. Just the way I like it. In addition to reference material there's some nice information about anatomy of a jQuery script (first chapter) and plugins (last chapter). Despite this I believe that beginners will probably be served better by some other book, such as "Learning jQuery 1.3" or "jQuery in Action". If you need something quickly to refer to while developing using jQuery this is the book to pick. There's no way around that.
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