By Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer
Packt Publishing, 2010,
ISBN 978-1-84951-004-2
Hot on the heels of the release of jQuery 1.4 comes a reference work
that covers all of the jQuery functionality. It is aimed at Web developers
that want to view the range of jQuery's offerings and those who want
a quick reference to those abilities.
As advertised, this book covers all the available functionality, with chapters on the selectors available, traversal methods, DOM manipulation, events, effects, and AJAX. Each item in these categories is presented showing its syntax, a list of any parameters and return values, a description of the funcitonality, and generally an example or two to show how it is used. There is also an introductory chapter on extending jQuery via plugins, although this will be covered in much greater detail in a forthcoming title. An alphabetic listing in a final chapter completes the picture for when you can remember the name of a function, but not necessarily which category it belongs to.
As is common with such reference works, this book it not something that
you would normally read from start to finish, although doing so
can reveal useful abilities within jQuery.
For example, I learnt about passing parameters to event handlers
via the bind and
trigger
functions, and about the ability to
load only parts of
a retrieved document. I thought that there was some information missing,
however, particularly the order of nodes within a selection, something
that has changed with jQuery 1.4, and how this differs for some functions,
such as parents.
The content is essentially repeated as the online jQuery API documentation. If this is available I prefer to work with it instead since it offers searching and links between topics.
Overall I found the book provided good coverage of the vast range
of abilities offered by jQuery. The section on events was very
instructive, with a good explanation of the event object itself.
As with all technology books, it suffers from trying to hit a moving target.
With jQuery 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 released in quick successsion,
there are now new functions available (such as
delegate)
that will need to be addressed in a future edition.