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Author(s): Jonathan Chaffer, Karl Swedberg ISBN: 1849510040 Published: January 2010 Relevance: 5/5 Readability: 5/5 Overall: 5/5 |
More Packt Publishing Books Reviews …
This is an excellent valuable and mandatory reading, I really enjoyed reading this book, be aware this book is not for beginners, it assume already knowledge about JQuery 1.4, doing this book an excellent complement and of course a pretty good reference guide
For me is little complicated to write a review for this book, due its written style, bear in mind this is a reference guide!,
with this premise below my own appreciation for its chapters:
Chapter 01: Anatomy of a JQuery Script
Here the author start introducing the content of a web page containing many sections for special purposes covered later in the coming chapters. Then how obtain jQuery and how integrate into a HTML document is shown, with these introductions, the author forward to write the first jQuery code, after of this, many features of jQuery are introduced based on the previous code, based in a concrete theory and even explaining by snippet code many extracted sections of the original source code, like:
- Selector expressions
- DOM traversal methods
- DOM manipulation methods
- Event methods
- Effect methods
- Ajax methods
Since it is the first chapter, of course it is only for introduction purposes
Chapter 02: Selector Expressions
An interesting and important material, I like this chapter, has a huge amount of examples and variations about Selector Expressions, like the classic by id and class, and even the more complex like childs, sibling and more!, really well covered, each type include a snipet code with its respective explanation about how the code works and the most important, for each one showing the expected output result(s) and its respective reason, be sure that some interesting results you’re going to find out in this chapter.
Same appreciation for Attributes selectors, and custom selectors, is impressive this chapter!!!
Chapter 03: DOM traversal methods
This is a long chapter like the previous, really well covered, this chapter has mostly two sections, the first for Filtering methods like filter, has, eq, first, last and others, the second Tree traversal methods like find, children, parent, siblings, prev, next and more.
For this chapter a good amount of code and explanation is available.
Chapter 04: DOM manipulation methods
Other long chapter, again, really well covered like the two previous chapters, here we can divide this chapter on many valuable and important sections, I going to share the most important (see the complete TOC for the complete content), the first General attributes like attr (getter/setter) and removeAttr, the second Style properties (even including images for a better understanding) coveringcss, height, innerHeight, outerHeight, offset, and others, other section is DOM replacement like html, text, val and others, the next are DOM Insertion inside/outside like prepend, prependTo, append, before, after, and others.
Again for this chapter a good amount of code and explanation is available.
Chapter 05: Event methods
Definitively an important and long chapter, working with the follow sections like Event handler attachment covering bind, unbind trigger and others, Document loading such as ready, load, unload, error; and Mouse events such as mousedown/up, click, dbclick, toggle, mouseover, mouseout, mouseenter, mouseleave; Form events focus, blur, change, select, submit; Keyboards events like keydown, kepress and keyup.
A lot of pages with valuable code is available, again bear in mind this is a reference guide!.
Chapter 06: Effect methods
Covered mostly on two sections, the first Pre-packaged effects like show, hide, sliceDown/Up, fadeIn/Out and the second Customized effects such as animate, stop, delay and others, this chapter includes images to represent the behavior of these methods for a better understanding.
Chapter 07: Ajax methods
An important and valuable chapter, simple and concrete, and something important is that practically for each method each argument is explained, well done!, of course the explanation and source code is available, some methods are ajax, get, load,post, getJSON, ajaxError,ajaxSend, ajaxStart, ajaxStop, serialize and serializeArray.
Chapter 08: Miscellaneous Methods
An interesting chapter, same approach than the previous chapters, covering many methods (see the complete TOC for the complete content) like size, each , makeArray, inArray, map, merge, unique, extend, trim, param, isArray, data and removeData.
Chapter 09: JQuery Properties
Practically the shortest chapter, covering practically quickly with pure theory and URL references some properties like boxModel, cssFloat, htmlSerialize, noCloneEvent, scriptEval, style and others.
Chapter 10: The Plug-in API
This is a shortest chapter, introducing about what is a plugin and its advantages, and how we can develop a plugin (Object method and Global Function), futhermore Plugin-in Conventions are covered too.
Chapter 11: Alphabetical Quick Reference
A valuable reference in three sections Selector expressions, Methods and Properties, each one on a table listing each element by name, a brief description and on which page is located in the book.
What I liked:
- Valuable theory and good amount of source code, you can read the entire book comfortably
- A huge amount of methods really well covered including output results
- Easy to understand a 99% the source code throughout the book
What I disliked:
A deeper covering about Plugins
Conclusion:
I recommend this book definitively if you want a golden JQuery reference on hands, really is an excellent book
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