I have a project in the office at the moment to simply a lot of the mixed JavaScript libraries / frameworks down to just one. Having a chat with guys in the office some of whom already have jQuery experience which is a good start and the recent blog postings from Ray Camden we are going to simply down to using just jQuery.

I got stuck in with a large complex piece to convert and found it quite straight forward with jQuery, using the examples around the net and tweaking what I needed and so rather then hacking together a solution from examples that I didn't fully understand I decided to get the learning jQuery from packt (My luck and rushing head first 2 days after my copy arrived the new edition was out) I have to say at 340 pages it's not very daunting and is a very easy read, I read it in a week during my daily commute and I have to say to showed me how to do some very complicated moves we had to make to make our site as easy to use as possible.

It starts out with a very simple yet detailed view of jQuery and a little on it's history. I think its nice to know where the technology comes from before you get intimate with it.

It then goes on to detail how you can select just about anything on the page and change its appearance with ease.

This is followed by events and how to trigger things when a user does something. Once your user can interact with you page you then want some flair and effects this is covered in easy yet detailed terms to with great pointers.

Of course their are times you want to change the fundamental makeup of your page and this covered in chapter 5 on manipulating the dom, closely followed by incorporating buzzwords with the use of ajax calls to stop those darn page refreshes.

Then the section that all designers hate is about manipulating tables, but relax people its using tables for data not layout (As they were meant for) and shows you how to do nice sorting, filtering paging and other neat tricks.

What website could be complete without a form and form with validation on the client side. Chapter 8 shows some really funky but simple was to spruce up boring forms.

Chapter 9 goes over using shufflers and rotators to make a page more interactive with enlarging images and giving more info etc.

Finally chapter 10 gives an intro to a few top plug-ins and then sets you up nicely to build your own plug-ins.

Appendices A to C give info on online resources; browser tools and some great JavaScript pointers to ensure you have a smooth and enjoyable ride.

All in all I think this a great book for developers and designers alike and you don't need to know any JavaScript or other library before you start.

10 out 10 to get anyone started with jQuery even backend developers like me who hate the fancy front end.
 

	Title : Learning JQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple Javascript Techniques Ref. No : 1847192505 Publisher : Packt Publishing Limited Author : Karl Swedberg ; Jonathan Chaffer Price*: £24.99    User level: All   Date pub: Jun 2007