Ken Guest’s online diary

A while ago I was sent a review copy of “Learning JQuery 1.3” by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg, as published by Packt. I’ve now had a chance to read it objectively and compare it against the original “Learning JQuery” which Packt also sent me to review about a year ago. That earlier edition covered a much less mature version (version 1.1.3.1 to be precise) of this popular Javascript framework.

Aimed at web developers and designers with a basic understanding of HTML and CSS (and some level of comfort with Javascript), the later book is thicker than the original – it weights in at some 440 pages compared to the 360 pages that were required for the first. A new chapter, “Developing Plugins” covers how to write plugins for the framework and how to “share it with the world” – naming conventions, documentation style and other advice are included. There is also a new “Quick Reference” appendix which just begs to be reproduced in “Cheat-sheet” format for pinning up on your wall. Chapters already present in the earlier book are more detailed and read better.

The subject matter is expertly covered and unless you were aware of the changes in jQuery 1.3, compared to the older version that the original was focused it would be difficult to tell which portions of the book are new – the revision and updates to the original are seamless.

Quite rightly, Swedberg and Chaffer do not explain all differences between jQuery 1.3 and its predecessors – they rightly assume that if you’re reading “Learning JQuery 1.3″ then you don’t need to be informed of exactly how jQuery 1.3 differs from the version they previous covered. The book flows better because of this and remains very easy to understand because of this approach.

There is no hint of the selector engine in 1.3 being any different than what was already covered. The language used for explaining the different concepts to the reader is more precise, especially so in the Events chapter and this makes understanding the concepts being covered much more easy – for this reason alone buying the revised edition is well worth the money.

The book doesn’t focus on new additions that were freshly added to jQuery 1.3 but also ones that had been added to jQuery since the first edition was published; JSONP, which was introduced in jQuery 1.2 is covered in the chapter on AJAX, as is the more low-level $.ajax() method; it also mentions which features have been removed from jQuery since the first edition was published – XPath being one such example. The listing of development tools has also been reworked, as has the Online Resources section. These listings mention resources that are current and up-to-date.

I remember mentioning in my review of the first book (trying hard not to use the word ‘original’ again!) that until a later edition of it was released that you wouldn’t be able to find a better book on the subject. I stand by that assertion – the only book that covers jQuery better than the first edition of “Learning jQuery” is the second edition of the same.