Microsoft Silverlight Books

Pro. Dev Take on the Book

I have been a professional developer for 4 years now mainly focused in the windows services and back ground communication pipelines. I was asked to pick up support for an app written with alot of jQuery. I was given "jQuery Cookbook" by a friend and I fell in love. It is straight into the meat. Normally I have to wait 2-4 chapters before the useful stuff gets going and with the cookbook I was diving in right away. I haven't written any jQuery before reading the book but I did understand javascript and the DOM. With that foreknowledge the book made jQuery so amazingly easy. I could not have picked up jQuery in 2 short weeks without this book. I recommend this book to any professional developer that is looking to add jQuery to their skill set.

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Devlin Liles
03 August, 2010

jquery cookbook review

If the author was trying to impress me with cryptic language, discussion sections that often had little to do with preceding examples and the occasional repetition of some items, then I was truly impressed. Actually, the book is is in need of an editor that can bring together chapters that appear to have been written by numerous authors.

flyfanatic
02 August, 2010

Lots of Good Stuff

What can I say? The O'Reilly Cookbook series is great - and this book fits right in. The first few sections can almost be read and used as a tutorial. The other recipes are clear and well-written.

In addition to the basics, they also do a good job of covering topics like jQueryUI, Ajax, and unit testing.

Heck, for $25 all you need is to have one of them guide you to a solution and the book has already paid for itself!


Larry
01 August, 2010

Great Book

Really good book to get you started with jQuery. It starts out with a brief overview of everything web for those not familiar with some of the basics, most of which you can probably skip. I did find that the jQuery basics was helpful and it filled in some of gaps and showed me some techniques I wasn't aware of. Not being a hard core javascript or css writer it's easy to miss a lot of browser compatibility issues and jQuery deals with these issues for you very nicely but I've found that it can be a little tough to find what I'm looking for in the jQuery documentation online. For me, this book filled that gap nicely by covering many of the most frequent types of things you'd want to do. With web content getting more and more complex jQuery is a must-have tool to avoid compatibility issues and this book is a great way to get started and to quickly identify the proper techniques to using it.

C. Holliday
15 July, 2010

Good recipes

I like this book more than any other jQuery book I've seen, especially Dan Wellman's neverending stream of Packt titles. The recipes are all practical and to-the-point, with very little in the way of useless padding no one needs. Even though it's not a "Learn jQuery" sort of book, if you have a decent grasp of JavaScript, you shouldn't need much more to get going--maybe an up-to-date reference since this only covers 1.3.x I believe.

My one gripe is that the example code is a little tricky to read in black-and-white. Every sample hits you with a giant blast of markup with the little tidbit of JavaScript you need to focus on buried somewhere in the middle of it. It's set in bold, but it's still pretty tough to figure out exactly what it is on the page that you're supposed to be caring about without some careful study. I don't know how they could have improved the situation without paying for color plates, though, so I can't complain too much.

orangekay
20 May, 2010

Everything

Before this book all I did was plug-and-play with every Jquery plugin out there. With this book, I'm realizing there is a lot more to it than I thought. It's the perfect book to help you learn how to write your own plugins, and at the same time, simple enough to aid in your quest to highlighting every other DIV on the page, or bolding only the last paragraph.

Quick, easy, to the point.

I suppose the only 'drawback' is it's advancement. I do not have much programming experience, and there are elements found in this book that make my head spin. However, my 5 stars shows that the book does what it's supposed to and I'm happy to get caught up and learn all these advanced techniques...although I'll say I can't see how too many people will implement them in their own sites.

Jason Semko
13 May, 2010

Great overview and in-depth

This book is an excellent all around guide to JQuery. I was pretty new to JQuery and feel like this is a great introduction showcasing JQuery's capabilities, as well as great reference for seasoned JQuery developers.

C. Buhecker
08 March, 2010

Great Content

With some books you can quickly locate the detail you require from the index, retrieve, adapt and use in your own scenario and then put it back on the shelf for a later date. This book, although you can do that, I would suggest you read it in it's entirety so that you don't miss some of the hidden away gems that will aid you in your future jQuery development. A great foundation builder for both jQuery and the less known UI library, I highly recommend it for beginner to intermediate programmers.

Mathew Garland
26 February, 2010

Best coverage of writing jQuery plug-ins

This is an exceptionally well written and comprehensive book. I found it especially invaluable for its coverage of writing jQuery plug-ins. The book filled in all of the gaps from the rather sketchy abbreviated coverage of writing jQuery plug-ins you can find online. I like the recipe format, too: all meat, no fluff.



Shelley R Powers
15 February, 2010

Explains both concrete examples and higher-level jQuery/JS concepts

Though this book does contain a number of practical, "plug-in-to-your-site"-type recipes, I think it's at its best when delving into some more general jQuery and Javascript principals such as how to write cleaner, more efficient code. These are things that can be used over and over, regardless of what site your working on or what you're trying to accomplish. The authors write clearly and concisely, explaining the Solution to each Problem in the Discussion section.

A number of other reviewers say this book is appropriate for everyone, from beginner to advanced, but I would hesitate to recommend it to an absolute beginner. However, if you have some familiarity with jQuery (perhaps from reading Learning jQuery 1.3) and want to learn more, this book is a must-have.

I did wish there were a few more Ajax-related recipes.

Nora Brown
10 February, 2010

A fantastic reference

This is a true gem among other jquery books. Down-to earth, very practical and immediately applicable. Examples are consise, but well thought-out, and it covers a great number of different cases.

I would call myself a beginner jquery coder, but during the first hour of browsing through this book, I learned more about this framework than from reading any of the more typical "beginner's guide to..." type of book I've tried. Better yet, I could immediately improve my own website with several nice tricks from this book.

Marcin Lejman
07 January, 2010

Another Great O'Reilly Cookbook

The jQuery Cookbook, like the many other Cookbook series of books from O'Reilly proves to be an extremely valuable addition to any web developer's bookshelf. There's nothing unexpected here - it's a book full of practical solutions to hundreds of everyday problems.

The first chapter, "jQuery Basics" is meant to be a crash course introduction to jQuery, but it likely won't suffice if you're new to jQuery, and certainly won't prepare you if you're relatively unfamiliar with javascript in general. This book is primarily intended for the everyday jQuery developer who wants a reference for specific issues that come up in projects.

If you are familiar with jQuery basics, a cover-to-cover reading of this book will take you to the next level, but most developers will only read the entries that pertain to the problems they face during development.

The jQuery Cookbook was written by the jQuery community - people who have faced these issues in their own development and have solved them in the real world. I found that a majority of the recipes were well written and clear with properly tested and working code. All-in-all, the jQuery Cookbook is a useful and reliable resource for practical jQuery development.


Adam Barney
06 January, 2010

Full of "recipes"

This book is full of jQuery "recipes", by recipes the author is supplying a set short problems, solutions, and discussions covering a concept. Most of the recipes are between one and two pages and cover a wide variety of jQuery. Although I read this book cover to cover, it is probably better as a reference tool. It starts out with simple examples and progresses into more advanced examples. Still this book appears to be aimed more at the beginner to intermediate. Having very little jQuery experience I found the book quite easy to follow and examples easy to understand.

Although the book is mostly examples, it does address some interesting concepts, such as the concept of putting your JavaScript at the end of the page to enhance performance.

I like to type code when studying a book, but all the examples are on the web and can be viewed without writing any code. You can also do a "view page" and copy all the code to be modified if you want to use it. I don't normally give five stars for books, but I did for this one. I find it very useful and keep it on the desk for easy reference. Even an advanced person might find a few gems in it, which they could find useful.

George
02 January, 2010

Great Book on jQuery to Get Started

jQuery is considered the most popular and easy to use JavaScript library. It used by websites big and small with large corportations like Google and MSN. Although there are a few books on jQuery already and the jQuery website ([...]) has lots of useful information, there is still a lacking of a good jQuery book that can show the reader some very useful ways to use jQuery. This is an excellent book on showing the introductory to intermediate developers how to use jQuery efficiently and quickly.

Chapter 1 : jQuery Basics
Chapter 2 : Selecting Elements with jQuery
Chapter 3 : Beyond the Basics
Chapter 4 : jQuery Utilities
Chapter 5 : Faster, Simpler, More Fun
Chapter 6 : Dimensions
Chapter 7 : Effects
Chapter 8 : Events
Chapter 9 : Advanced Events
Chapter 10 : HTML Form Enhancements from Scratch
Chapter 11 : HTML Form Enhancements with Plugins
Chapter 12 : jQuery Plugins
Chapter 13 : Interface Components from Scratch
Chapter 14 : User Interfaces with jQuery UI
Chapter 15 : jQuery UI Theming
Chapter 16 : jQuery, Ajax, Data Formats: HTML, XML, JSON, JSONP
Chapter 17 : Using jQuery in Large Projects
Chapter 18 : Unit Testing

The author takes the reader through the entire gambit of jQuery lerning from the basics of selecting elements, utilites, and effects to advanced event handling, ajax and plugins and much more.

This 'cookbook' can be used as either a learning tool for the beginner or as a reference book for the seasoned jQuery user who needs to find a script or technique quickly.

A great book and definitely worth buying if you really want to learn jQuery.

Frank Stepanski
19 December, 2009

Great organization and valuable information throughout

The organization of this book, like most of the O'Reilly cookbooks, is excellent. You will not be paging through the book trying to find that little nugget of information, it will be easy to find again when you discover you need it.

The book covers a number of general Javascript topics as well as JQuery specific topics. Any one of the chapters alone could well be worth the price of the book.



Sean McKenna
06 December, 2009

Straight-forward, clear, simple, like jQuery itself!

Much anticipated jQuery cookbook that was well worth the wait.

This cookbook will serve any (beginner to intermediate) jQuery/web 2.0 developer with 150+ easy to grasp "recipes". Nothing groundbreaking here, just great scripts that do 95% of what you need to do faster/efficiently. END NOTE: I was hoping for more AJAX-jQuery or JSON related material. This book with jQuery in Action is a good combo.


S. Gittens
28 November, 2009