jQuery Book Reviews

[End User]

A quick review of 3 jQuery books.JQUERY Novice to Ninja, by Sitepoint: Pretty good overall. The book walks you through learning and using jQuery in an ordered manner. Although it leaves out a few key items regarding usage that might confuse novices (like me), the book is well-written and provides plenty of code examples. It would be nice if they provided more complete examples of typical usage, like "here's how to do an ajax call" or "here's how to make a span change colors back and forth". The biggest complaint I have with this book is that it has far too many exclamation points- so many of them that there must have been a punctuation sale near the author's home. "Let's learn jQuery!", "Now let's toggle a div!", "Chaining actions is the best part of jQuery!", "That's how we access an element!" ...and on and on and on. There are several exclamation points on almost every page and in nearly every paragraph! It gets VERY tiresome very quickly! (Honestly- I've read comic books with fewer exclamation points.) In a technical manual (even a casually-written one) a plethora of exclamation points like this is annoying and inappropriate! It's like an exclamation point blizzard! It made me want to go over the book with a bottle of whiteout! With that said, yes, I'd recommend it, even at the $40.00 cover price. It's a good book! Really! I mean it! And it even has exclamation points! jQuery Recipes, by Apress: Dreadful, stay away. The language is very stilted, written like Captain Kirk wrestling a Romulan: "Must...Use...Document...Ready. Beware...Syntax...Errors." Worse than that, however, is that the book has a fair number of mistakes that even I (a total jQuery noob), stumbled over and caught. Misnamed divs, incorrect code with non-matching examples, code with typos, etc etc. The general text also has more than a few grammatical errors which will poke your eyes out if you're not careful. Hiring an editor was, apparently, not an expense that got approved. It's hard enough to learn new stuff without having to proofread and correct the book as you go. And ironically, it was the most expensive of the lot- $45.00 (ouch!). In the end, I would NOT recommend this book. This book was so bad I ended up driving back to Barnes & Noble and returning it- something I almost never do. I told the clerk, "This book is no good. I do not like this book. I do not want this book. Give me back my money or I will read it to you." And faced with that threat they quickly issued me a refund. jQuery Cookbook, by O'Reilly: As with every O'Reilly book I've ever seen, this one is excellent. I have nothing bad to say about this one, not a word. It has lots of code examples, clear descriptions and explanations, and best of all the material is practical, not theoretical. It's not really a "learn jQuery" book but it does provide a very good "jQuery Basics" section- you could learn jQuery just from this book even though that's not its intended purpose. It's written by an team of experienced jQuery coders and has a forward from jQuery's creator, John Resig. The book covers a wide range of topics broken up into logical categories, i.e. dimensions, effects, events, plugins, etc. This book has loads of useful examples and tricks, plus warnings about typical pitfalls and mistakes. You just can't go wrong with O'Reilly books in my experience. At $35.00, it's a bargain and I highly recommend it.

[thescientist]

so many of them that there must have been a punctuation sale near the author's home.

:)top of the muffin....TO YOU!!!!!!