Author: Bintu Harwani
Publisher: Apress
Pages: 350
ISBN: 978-1430227090
Aimed at: Web developers who already know JavaScript
Rating: 2
Pros: Practical recipe approach
Cons: Not really about jQuery, doesn't go beyond the trivial
Reviewed by: Ian Elliot

I really didn't get on with this book but you might find  it has a use. I was expecting a book of jQuery recipes but instead they are mostly exercises in standard JavaScript with jQuery doing some of the work.

For example,it covers how to attach event handlers to a set of buttons and then fire the events - something that involves a fairly trivial use of jQuery. If you know how to do the job using JavaScript and the DOM then it will be fairly obvious to you how to do the job with jQuery methods. It's more as if the author has taken a book of JavaScript recipes and added bits of jQuery to justify the name of the book.

jQuery is a powerful and potentially complicated framework and there is certainly scope for a book of recipes that show you how to use it. For example, using its selectors to pick out all the buttons on a form is easy, but how do you pick out all the buttons that have a particular div as their parent - or better all those buttons that don't have a particular div as their parent? This is tricky, but the book simply ignores these possibilities by considering just standard JavaScript stuff.

In a book that delivered some recipes that really were targeted at jQuery then you could forgive a little "padding" with simpler and more general recipes. You might even be able to justify them on the grounds that it shows how jQuery fits into the bigger picture but you can't really get away with an entire book of them! There are also many recipes that simply don't seem likely to be solving real problems - they are more like demos of some method or other. This wouldn't be too bad but the explanations of why and how things work aren't good. jQuery has some interesting approaches to things such as chaining methods but this book really doesn't make any case for a different approach or how to think about jQuery.

You might find some value in this book if all you want are some fairly tedious recipes that show how to do familiar things but with the help of a little bit of jQuery tagged on. If you really want some examples that show jQuery going through its paces you need to look elsewhere.