Author: jQuery Community Experts

Format: Paperback, 476 pages

Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (November 26, 2009)

ISBN-10: 0596159773

ISBN-13: 978-0596159771



I love jQuery. It's not like there aren't other JavaScript libraries out there, but jQuery was the first I became involved with and so far, it's solved every web design problem I've encountered. Of course, I usually go searching for a jQuery solution on the web when I have such a problem. That's why I was looking forward to O'Reilly's jQuery Cookbook. I anticipated that, whenever I had a specific problem, I'd have a better than even chance of finding the solution between the book's covers rather than having to go "Googling". But is that really so?



First things first. Who should buy this book? Part of the blurb on the back cover says that the expertise level is "intermediate" and that "Previous JavaScript programming experience is required". If that doesn't include you, then get some JavaScript programming experience before buying the book or, buy the book and put it on the shelf until you grow into it. Interestingly enough, the book's Preface suggests that it might be helpful to use this book with one or two other books released by other publishers. That's a rather unusual recommendation, particularly for O'Reilly, but it does point to the absence of jQuery books on the market today, or at least beginner's jQuery books published by O'Reilly.



I'm happy that the first chapter is called jQuery Basics and not JavaScript Basics. If knowledge is presumed by the book, then it should stick to its guns, so to speak. Indeed, if you knew little or nothing about JavaScript, let alone jQuery, even Chapter 1 would seem a tad baffling. Remember, cookbooks are for people (generally) who have some idea already of how to do basic cooking, at least as far as how to turn on the stove, put water in a pan, and knowing what a teaspoon is. The same is true for a jQuery Cookbook. Some coding experience is required.



The parts I was interested in though, were the actual recipes. What would the book say about solving problems and would they be issues I'd consider common or worthy (not that my opinion is absolute or anything)? The first problem solved was very basic: how to add jQuery code to an HTML page. It's more or less telling you how to insert a link in the header section of the HTML, and if you've used CSS and JavaScript, this should be abundantly apparent. It gets more interesting from here.



Oh, and if you are wondering about sample code, there's none housed at the O'Reilly site dedicated to this book; at least there's no reference in the book pointing to such a location. However, the jQuery code is readily available from jQuery.com and generally, each recipe either tells you what to insert in the printed example, or points you to the relevant URL for the download. For any jQuery solution I've ever used, I've always needed to download the example page showing how it's inserted into the HTML, some JavaScript, a style sheet, and the specific jQuery library for the solution. If you're a beginner, you won't be writing your own jQuery libraries yourself anyway, so this process is quite ordinary.



The authors. There are almost 20 people who've contributed to this book, making it a collaborative effort of SMEs, rather than the product of one or two writers/programmers. This is also consistent with a cookbook-style approach and adds a lot of variety and flavor to the solutions the book contains. In an unusual move, each chapter indicates the name of the contributor, so I suppose if you had a question, you could address it directly to him or her, rather than sending O'Reilly the email query.



Oh, I said beginners don't write jQuery plugins themselves, but recipe 12.2 is indeed called When Should You Write a jQuery Plugin? This says two things. One, that the book does progress into that level of complexity relative to jQuery. Two, that not every possible solution is contained in the book or even in the vastness of the web. Sometimes you have to invent, rather than reinvent the wheel, or in this case, write a new jQuery Plugin to solve a unique issue.



I mentioned the dearth of jQuery books on the market, and particularly beginners jQuery books published by O'Reilly, but it's not quite true that they don't exist. David Sawyer MacFarland wrote JavaScript: The Missing Manual for Pogue Press, which is an imprint of O'Reilly. What the title of the book doesn't reveal is that about half of the book's content is really about jQuery. In fact, having reviewed the book way back when, I can tell you that MacFarland teaches you more about jQuery than he does about straight, vanilla-flavored JavaScript. I'm surprised no one (before me) thought to make the connection. It's not even suggested reading for the jQuery Cookbook at Amazon.



You probably could get away with this book being your first exposure to jQuery, particularly if you have some sort of coding and web design background, but I'd recommend getting some basic experience in JavaScript and jQuery elsewhere first. HTML experience is a given of course, but a lot of jQuery solutions heavily incorporate CSS, so the person who's designed more than a few web sites before picking up this book is probably the ideal reader. That said, O'Reilly has published another quality product with jQuery Cookbook. Now if they'd just get to work writing a companion book like jQuery: The Definitive Guide, that would be sweet.

Title: jQuery Cookbook
Category: Programming
Sub-Category: Programming Books
Author: James Pyles
Added: January 1st 2010
Viewed: 4487 Times
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