JavaScript & jQuery: The Missing Manual [Paperback]

This is a very well written book. I admit I was not completely new to jQuery when I read this, so I'm not sure about the learning curve, but I felt the book does a better job of fully explaining things than some other jQuery books do. It often provides line by line explanations of code rather than just summaries or generalizations. The book is a bit longer than some other jQuery books because of this added detail, and also because it really does cover a lot of material.

I enjoyed the writing style/tone of the book - it's not overly technical/serious, but also isn't over the top.

I also really appreciate the unqiue approach it takes of teaching you everything practical you need to know about "raw" javascript in order to enhance jQuery without getting into details many users may not need to know. If you're wondering, the content is roughly 3/4ths jquery and 1/4th pure javascript.

I do have a few complaints - the book does occasionally spend a bit too much time talking about specific plug-ins and how to use them. Usually it walks you through you how to do a simple task and then uses a plug-in for a more advanced version of it (such as galleries and form validation). I have mixed feelings about this (especially when some of these plug-ins have complete documentation on their websites) but since this is really just a personal opinion I didn't take a star off for it. There is also very little content related to making your own plug-ins, which is a cool feature of jQuery that a few other books do touch on. I found this odd given how often the book talks about plug-ins. There are a few typos here and there but I did not find any that affected the success of the examples - mostly just grammatical things.

Overall my favorite book on jQuery thus far, highly recommended!

I really enjoyed this book and the writing style. The author takes a concept-tutorial ( cookbook ) approach where he first introduces you to the concepts of selectors, events, animation, etc. and then walks through 1 or more tutorials that show you how to leverage those concepts to add common features to your website. The tutorials are useful, like FAQ's, drop-down menus, Google Maps, Flickr Feeds, photo galleries, form validation, etc. If you follow along with the book and write the CSS and jQuery, you will indeed get a very good understanding of the functionality found in most websites today.

In addition to writing most of your own jQuery, the author also introduces you to a few jQuery Plugins that provide similar functionality. This way you understand the concepts, know how to develop the solution yourself, but also get the efficiency of using available, feature-rich plugins. I agree with another reviewer that these discussions of various plugins can't get a bit long, but often jQuery Plugins don't have the best documentation so this is nice to have for reference in case you do use the plugin for your projects.

My only complaint is the inclusion of "JavaScript" in the title of the book. I believe it is a bit misleading as it only has some basic coverage of JavaScript. It is just a simple intro to variables, looping, etc. Make no mistake that this is a jQuery book. Don't expect to truly learn JavaScript.

IMHO, the book is geared for beginners that want more than the documentation-type snippets you get from jQuery in Action and less visual noise that you get from Head First jQuery. It's a really good cookbook that teaches you the concepts and then how to apply those concepts in the real world in a very easy-to-follow approach. I highly recommended it if you are new to jQuery and enjoy the cookbook style approach to learning without the need of seeing every possible piece of the API and numerous pictures and visuals to understand it.

Two problems:

1. Too much reliance upon the downloaded example files. I don't appreciate page after page of load this file, go to line x, add this, change that... Most of those examples should have the explanations in the comments within the example files, not in page after page of the book. The book does not stand alone well.

2. There is a lot of information here but the author fails to follow through on obvious paths. For example, dealing with interactive forms, probably one of the most popular things people want to do, it provides tiny disjointed examples of sending information back to the server and getting back a single result but the author does not reasonably explain dealing with multiple values. He seems to be in a hurry to move on and so does not finish a topic.

Useful, but frustrating. I'm constantly bouncing all over the place because the author makes references forward and back.