Beginning JavaScript and CSS Development with jQuery
I’m currently building some UI stuff for an application and I needed a better way to my web-pages. As usual I’m about a year behind everybody else so I’ve had the pleasant surprise of getting to know jQuery. Before I’d do all of this stuff by hand without the benefit of a library like jQuery. The really kickass part is the calendar control. jQuery’s calendar control freaking rocks.
Usually for something like this I’d just use the web, but I decided grabbing a book wouldn’t hurt and might speed things up. So I grabbed Richard York’s book and read it last week. Actually, I only read the first 9 chapters and the chapter on the DatePicker and Dialogs. I’ll go read the other chapters as I need.
The book is written well enough to be useful. However, I think it could be slimmed down. A lot. As I’m often likely to do I started to just skim and use the book as a tour guide. I looked over the samples to make sure I understood what was happening and moved on. I don’t need or want long winded explanations.
Something to note: this is not a beginning javascript book as the title might imply. He does not talk about javascript syntax. No chapter on the foreach loop. If that is what you need get a different book.
Overall I think the 3 star Amazon rating is accurate. It’s a good book and it is useful to me as a tour guide. If I had to buy it with my own money would I still have bought it? Yes. It would have taken me more than 4 days to ramp up on all the jQuery stuff the book covered if I just used Google and my project. So it is definitely worth the money.