Book review: Learning jQuery 1.3
Apparently I didn’t scare away the good folks at Packt Publishing with my last couple of book reviews, so they asked me to take a look at a couple more. Both of the books are on jQuery and the first that I picked up was Learning jQuery 1.3 (on Amazon). Once again, I considered myself to be a good reviewer for this type of book because I don’t have a lot of jQuery experience. After thumbing through the book, though, it was clear that this book is more intended for those who are new to JavaScript and to jQuery rather than those experienced with JavaScript and looking to learn jQuery. As such, I found the pace of the book to be, for me, pretty slow even though I can imagine it being just the right pace for the target audience.
The book is generally well-structured, with chapter topics that logically follow one another and decent narrative explanations of why jQuery is better than using the normal browser interfaces for achieving various goals. Though the text is focused on jQuery, beginners should also pick up a decent understanding of JavaScript concepts as they related to the library. For instance, I found the brief section explaining event bubbling and capturing to be a particularly good, concise, practical explanation that would be easy to digest even for beginners.
My only real complaint about the book is that some of the technical details are not quite accurate. For example, Chapter 4 makes extensive use of parseFloat(), but the author incorrectly indicates that you should use 10 as the second argument to ensure the value is parsed as base-10. The parseFloat() function doesn’t actually have a second argument, so it leaves me wondering if he meant to use parseInt() or was just confused about proper use of parseFloat(). Also, the description of Ajax in chapter 6 was a little too simplistic for my tastes, introducing XML as a necessary component and XMLHttpRequest as the necessary transport mechanism. The lines between JSON and object/array literals were a bit to blurry as well.
After the first few chapters, the book focuses on creating cool and useful effects on HTML pages. This, of course, is the area in which jQuery excels. All of the most common effects are included: form validation, animation, autocomplete, and Ajax interactions. This is, I believe, exactly what the target audience for this book would be interested in: quick solutions to create compelling user interactions for simple web sites or prototypes.
Overall, I think Learning jQuery 1.3 would be an excellent introduction to those with little to no JavaScript knowledge. I can see it being particularly useful for web designers looking to add basic effects to their pages. These readers will also likely pick up some decent core JavaScript knowledge along the way. More experienced developers will likely find the pace to be slow and won’t find solutions to more advanced problems.
Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.
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4 Comments
I think one – if not the most important – question should be: Why should I use jquery? It is my experience that about 80% up to 90% of the people who are using jquery doen’t even know simple Javascript syntax, and of course they won’t learn Javascript if they knew jquery.
Another important question: Does jquery really reflect competence? You mentioned an error in the book where the author didn’t use (and probably didn’t explain) parseFloat() properly. Thats exactly my experience with the jquery guys, so I’m not suprised about such an error.
Maybe it would be first and foremost a good idea if there could be given a serious answer to the question: Why should I use such a library at all? And if its really reasonable to do that (I think thats only appropriate in rare cases.) then there are arising inevitably other – not less important – questions: Why should I just use jquery and not another one these libraries, mootools, dojo or what the heck they are calling themselves?
wolfpil on June 10th, 2009 at 7:32 am
@wolfpil – I think you’re over-generalizing. Yes, you should always first ask yourself why you want to use a library and if a particular library is the right one for you as each has advantages and disadvantages. It seems like you don’t particularly like jQuery, which is certainly you’re right, but I think it’s unfair to jQuery users to make such harsh and general statements about them, especially on a blog post that is simply a book review.
I also don’t think a technical error in a book is evidence that jQuery users don’t know JavaScript, it more likely was an oversight or misunderstanding than any indication of incompetence. Having been through the book writing process many times, myself, I know that small issues slip through the cracks even when the most competent of people are working on a book.
Nicholas C. Zakas on June 13th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Hi Nicolas,
Thanks for your comments regarding our book. Especially after having read some of your other reviews, I’m quite pleased that your general impression of Learning jQuery 1.3 was a favorable one.
Also, I appreciate your giving us the benefit of the doubt with regard to the few errata that you noticed. It’s hard to recall all of the circumstances during the writing process, but my guess is that the parseFloat error (referring to its, nonexistent, second argument) cropped up when we decided at some point to use parseFloat rather than parseInt and failed to update the surrounding text. As for the Ajax description, it wasn’t our intention to claim XML as a necessary component. We mention XML in the beginning of the chapter as a way to explain the “AJAX” acronym, but also do our best to provide detailed examples of other data types being used (json, html, etc.).
In any case, as you’ve already graciously admitted, errors are unavoidable when writing this type of book.
@wolfpil, I don’t have much to add to what Nicholas wrote in response to your comment, but I think your sweeping generalizations about others’ competence are unfounded. Your question about whether or not to use a JavaScript library, on the other hand, is a good one. In fact, there are many other places on the web where the issue has been debated to death, and there are plenty of smart people with good arguments on both sides of the debate.
Karl Swedberg on June 13th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
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