Lucky me was given the opportunity to review Learning jQuery 1.3, so that’s what I’m going to do in this post. You can buy the book via this affiliate link.

Read on to find out if this book is right for you. There’s even a link to a free chapter at the bottom of this post so you can get a feel for it.

First off, a disclaimer: I’m not a hardcore programmer by any means. Functions and arguments and variable scopings make my head spin. I’m more of a jack-of-all-trades web developer who knows enough programming to hack away at some Ruby on Rails or PHP or jQuery and come away with something nice. Rarely something perfect, but nice nonetheless.

Something for everyone

Learning jQuery 1.3 has something for everyone. If you’re new to jQuery, this book will ease you into it. Yes, you can probably find all the same information online (much of it at jquery.com), but you’ll learn it much faster by working through the examples in the book. (And then you can spend that saved time working on some projects that will more than cover the cost of the book.)

There are also lots of great tips for more advanced coders. I learned bunches from my thorough read-through, and I’ll be referring back to it often, especially Chapter 11: Developing Plugins. And of course there were dozens of pages that made my head hurt, but I’m sure they can be helpful to the hardcore jQuery students.

Highlights

A few things I especially liked about Learning jQuery 1.3:

• Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation promoted throughout.
• Alternative ways of achieving the same result are often noted and/or explained; pros and cons of each approach listed.
• Clearly stated when an example is just for demo purposes and not sufficient for real-world use.
• Several walk-throughs of refactoring code to adhere to DRY principles.
• Very good about using semantic mark-up; alert you on the rare occasions that they don’t and explain why.
• The authors are obviously experts, but are also excellent at breaking everything down and stepping the reader through examples.
• Geeky humor.

Lowlights

Not too much I can point to here. I’d probably do the gradient fade effect (page 283) and revising styles with JavaScript (page 290) a little differently, but aside from that I found myself either nodding along or having repeated a-ha moments throughout.

Free Chapter

Yup, no word of a lie: all of Chapter 4 from Learning jQuery 1.3 is here for your perusal. The chapter introduces you to jQuery’s animation techniques, so you can see how to hide, show, and move page elements with nifty-smooth effects.

Learn jQuery, fast!

If this book sounds right for you, buy it via this link. Full disclosure: we make a 12% commission on each sale we refer.