jQuery for Designers : Beginners Guide, 2nd Edition 2nd Revised ed. Edition

MacLees does a great job of making jQuery approachable. If you're a web designer dipping your toes into the world of development, this is a great read.

If you'd like to hear more from the author first-hand, I had her on my podcast to discuss jQuery for Designers. (http://officehours.fm/podcast/65-2/)

This book is designed for the designers who have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS and would like to advance their skill set by learning basic JavaScript. If you have not written any JavaScript before, then this book will help you in writing your first JavaScript code using jQuery library.

Now let’s dive into each of the chapters to find out more.

Chapter 1, Designer, Meet jQuery, is an introduction to the jQuery library and JavaScript. In this chapter authors talks about the following points in a simple manner:

1. ‹What jQuery is and why it’s ideal for designers ‹
2. Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation
3. JavaScript basics ‹
4. Downloading jQuery
5. Your first jQuery script

It is a wonderful chapter to begin with as it has beautifully introduced jQuery to people in a very easy and step-by-step manner.

Chapter 2, Enhancing Links, will teach you how to use jQuery to turn a list of links into simple tabs. And also explains how to customise tool tips and introduces one to plugin concept. Author highlights the HTML mark up, then adds small chunks of jQuery code and finally completes the demonstration with CSS addition.

Readers’ can test their understanding through Pop Quiz introduced in the chapter.

Chapter 3, Making a Better FAQ Page, will help you to learn the following sub-topics:

1. ‹How to traverse an HTML document with jQuery
2. How to show and hide elements
3. How to use simple jQuery animations
4. How to easily toggle a class name for an element

As before, step-by-step html code creation, adding jQuery scripts to it and explanation of those code blocks will definitely help people in understanding jQuery concepts.

For complete review of the book, please visit http://pulakonline.com

Clear and concise, Natalie's exposition is a fitted approach for designers who want to learn the basic principles of web creation nowadays. Among other things, It shows the most trending practices in web design as grateful degradation and css3 shapes as a sort of examples. First to note, it's how carefully shows the programming concepts, and jquery ones to people who are not in a development role.
His main strength it's the metodism used to explain step by step each of the solutions proposed to solve common design scenarios. Starting with a common project structure, next the solution for JavaScript disabled browsers and then the jQuery plugin chosen for the chapter.
But, this comes with some drawbacks, though. Originally, it seems that the readers are going to learn programming skills, exclusively jQuery, at a minimum level to do theirs work. However, after a short introduction to jQuery, the book is based more in how to use a sort of chosen jQuery plugins than to learn basic skills to get benefits from that. The title seems contradictory and the readers may fall down in a recipe way read, sometimes bored, or sometimes repetitive. I appreciate the selected plugins and the concepts around design that provides along the chapters, but it lacks of jQuery learning basis, as the title suggest. Finally, no developers can get benefits from this reading, unluckily, while designers may get some tools, filtered by the author, and a short introduction to these, so that they can start improving their web sites in few minutes.

jQuery for Designers Second Edition (Packt Publishing 2014) by Natalie MacLees is certainly one of the best resources I've come across lately. The way this great learning resource came into my hands was totally by chance, actually by sheer good luck. I simply happened to win a contest on the occasion of Natalie MacLees' guest appearance on one of the well-known WPElevation podcasts. The best prize was Natalie's book, and I won! Thank you WPElevation and thank you Natalie for making available a copy of your book to the winner.

The second edition of jQuery for Designers (the first one goes back to 2012) is jam packed with how-tos, web design best practices, latest CSS3 techniques, and ways to test your learning. All of this, set in the concrete context of carrying out practical tasks that can be considered quite common practice when building contemporary website designs.

The author, Natalie MacLees, is a brilliant developer and WordPress expert. I also add, a great teacher: she succeeds in presenting what to some appears as a scary subject, like JavaScript and coding more generally, as being user-friendly, approachable, and quite harmless really.

Here's a closer look into Natalie's book.

What you'll find inside Natalie's book is a true development of what's written on the cover, starting from its title. Latest web design trends often involve injecting interactivity into web pages, and although CSS3 is helpful, it's still far from outgrowing the input that JavaScript is capable of offering to web development in this regard. This means that it's quite common to expect web designers to add JavaScript to their skills set. Vanilla JavaScript could be quite off-putting to a designer, especially when it comes to reconciling browser quirks and working out long-winded lines of code.

Here's jQuery to the rescue. To my knowledge, it's the most popular and designer-friendly JavaScript library around today and has an enthusiastic community of developers implementing it and contributing to it.

However, it's still JavaScript, and using it means getting familiar with some programming concepts, techniques, and best practices. All of this is in jQuery for Designers.

What about the book's approach to teaching? That too can be gathered from the cover. Just above the title, you find this simple maxim:

Learn by doing: less theory, more results

This is exactly what you'll find in the book. In other words, soon after the proper introductions between Designer and jQuery have been made, therefore breaking the ice and making everyone involved feel quite comfortable with each other, it's already time to tackle a practical design goal.

Not just any design goal, but a real world one, which gets gradually more ambitious as the book progresses from the earlier to the later chapters. The way each practical task in the book is structured is great:

1. Short introduction to the task
2. Step by step instructions on how to go about it
3. A What Just Happened section where the author recaps and further clarifies the steps taken to accomplish the task.

Just after the last project in each chapter, Natalie presents a Have a go hero section. Here, she suggests ways in which her readers could practice what they just learned and experiment with the new knowledge to better master it and get ready for the next step.

Where appropriate, the book also offers a quiz so that readers can further test their new knowledge. Answers to all the quiz questions are available at the end of the book.

Finally, each chapter closes off with a Summary section where the author briefly surveys the ground just covered and anticipates the topic of what comes next.

jQuery for Designers is extremely practical in its orientation, but also very dense in content. I could only give a sense of what it has to offer. As if this weren't enough, Natalie over-delivers. The book has in fact a companion website that offers great professional videos on how to use the awesome JavaScript library.

I'm talking about the Designers Learning jQuery screencasts, that is:

" ... quick, easy videos that introduce you to one jQuery concept. Learn jQuery in easily digestible bites!"

This is an excellent resource that Natalie generously shares with her readers.

To Sum Up

One point I'd like to drive home in this review is that jQuery for Designers is not just about jQuery. It's about the solution of web design problems using the popular JavaScript library and its plethora of plugins.

This means that you'll also find precious nuggets of web design knowledge like HTML5 and CSS3 tricks, or how to handle large images on the web. It also means that jQuery plugins are not just plugged into the project, but are fully configured and adapted to meet the project's needs, and I repeat, the book is crammed with real life web design projects that are very current to today's trends.

Will jQuery for Designers turn every designer into a jQuery coder? Certainly not, but that's not expected from this book.

I'm certain, however, that Natalie's book will give web designers the confidence to undertake and successfully accomplish real world tasks, most of which involving JavaScript programming, that their profession throws at them. A number of jQuery for Designers readers will also feel empowered to advance in their knowledge of the jQuery library by heeding Natalie's encouragement to do so at the end of her book:

" Be sure to stay connected to the jQuery community - it will be your best resource moving forward while further improving and growing your JavaScript skills."

For an expanded, chapter by chapter version of this review, please visit http://wpthememakeover.com/2014/10/17/jquery-for-designers-review/