My first exposure to jQuery was using other developer's plugins to create animation effects such as sliders, and accordion menus.
The highly refactored and compressed production code isn't the easiest to read and understand, especially if you want to alter the code to any great extent.
After reading a few tutorials, I thought I'd buy a book and get more involved with the jQuery library.
As an ASP.NET developer used to coding with intellisense, I was pleased that jQuery has been incorporated into Visual Studio to allow ease of developing.
I browsed through the jQuery books on Amazon and opted to buy "Learning JQuery 1.3
" by Jonathon Chaffer and Karl Swedberg after reading the user reviews.
I've now read most of the book and can highly recommend it. The book assumes the reader has good HTML, CSS knowledge as well as a familiarity with JavaScript and the DOM, but this enables the book to quickly move onto doing useful, everyday tasks with jQuery.
The first six chapters of the book explore the jQuery library in a series of tutorials and examples focusing on core jQuery components. Chapters 7 to 9 look at real-world problems and show how jQuery can provide solutions to them, and the final two chapters cover using and developing jQuery plugins.
Web developers should be aware of web accessibility and SEO issues with using client-side scripting and it is good to see the book highlighting the concepts of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation where appropriate.
"the inherent danger in making certain functionality, visual appeal, or textual information available only to those with web browsers capable of (and enabled for) using JavaScript. Important information should be accessible to all, not just people who happen to be using the right software." - Learning jQuery 1.3, page 94
After a brief introduction into the world of jQuery, what it does and how it came about the book moves quickly on to selectors, which are a fundamental part of how jQuery selects element(s) from the DOM. It also covers jQuery's chaining capability, which coming from other programming languages looks odd at the outset, but quickly proves to be a very powerful technique.
The authors then move on to talk about events. What I particularly like about the way jQuery handles events is that the behavioural code can be cleanly separated away from the HTML mark-up without having to litter tags with onclick and onload attributes.
The examples show how to add functionality on top of your HTML by binding events to elements on the page, which when triggered cause jQuery to modify the HTML to bring the page to life. Techniques are introduced by example, then slowly refactored and improved while introducing new jQuery methods along the way, which is a breeze to follow and learn.
The fourth chapter covers effects such as fading in and out and custom animations, and jumps straight in to cover a useful example of how text size can be increased on-the-fly for ease of reading. The intro also mentions an important usability example of effects.
jQuery effects "can also provide important usability enhancements that help orient the user when there is some change on a page (especially common in AJAX applications)."- Learning jQuery 1.3, page 67
Chapter 5 is all about DOM manipulation and covers jQuery's many insertion methods such as copying and cloning parts of the page, which it demonstrates with another useful example in the form of dynamically creating CSS styled pull quotes from a page of text used to attract a readers attention.
AJAX is the next topic, which interested me enough to create a little tool to load in an XML RSS feed and create a blog category list from the data.
The chapter covers the various options of loading partial data from the server including appending a snippet of HTML into the page, JSON, XML and how to choose which method is the most appropriate.
Table manipulation is next on the agenda and the book discusses how to sort table data preventing page refreshing using AJAX as well as client-side sorting, filtering and pagination.
Chapter 8 delves into forms, using progressive enhancement to improve their appearance and behaviour. It also covers AJAX auto-completion as well as an in-depth look at shopping carts.
Shufflers and Rotators are next and the book starts out by building a headline news feed rotator which gets it's headlines from an RSS feed, typically used by blogs. It also covers carousels, image shufflers and image enlargement.
Chapter 10 and 11 examine the plugin architecture of jQuery and demonstrate how to use plugins and build your own. I successfully produced my first jQuery plugin from reading this book. You can check out my tag cloud plugin and read about how I originally built it before turning it into a plugin that other developers can use.
