Book Review - "Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques" by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg

Recommend as a buy as an introduction to jQuery, especially those individuals intending to build or repurpose user-interactive pages and sites with Drupal versions 5 or 6.

I received my copy directly from Packt publishing as I wanted to one, do a little research into the relationship between Drupal and jQuery, which has now been included with Drupal since version 5, and two to learn a bit more about interactive site design to be able to design my own Drupal 6 modules and/or templates sometime in the near future.

I found the book easy to learn from and have already started a development instance that now includes some of the functionality from the book (a picture library for my 3D art), but in combination with other resources; jQuery in Action and http://jquery.com/ tutorials. I found it fell a bit short on some of the details I required, but then I was never intending to build the actual examples found in the book for my current production site, which is a Drupal based CMS and not an eCommerce site.

I found Chapter 2 quite useful, covering the basics and relationships between Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), XPath selectors and jQuery DOM traversal as I see this as something I will be using in either a Drupal module or modified template. As I recall these topics and areas are mentioned on one of the Drupal pages that one really needs to learn to understand, use and develop with Drupal. The section on jQuery and AJAX was also informative, at least for a beginner like myself.

The idea of writing less JavaScript code by using a library greatly appeals to me as writing or learning lots of code has never been my goal, focus or strength, the desired and resulting user functionality is and always will be. jQuery seems to satisfy this personal need and this book helped me to quickly learn and get up to speed on it. I think more experienced site developers and JavaScript masters will find it a bit short on information, and the index left a lot to be desired (only seven pages total?) as I found myself having to go to the jQuery web site for more on what I think is basic information; Chapter 3 Events, .bind() .click(), .toggle(), .hover(). The jQuery Resource book, also from Packt Publishing may prove more useful in this regard.

Appendix A Online Resources, and B, Development Tools both provide useful information for beginners, most I had already discovered before receiving the book.