Book Review Jquery Novice To Ninja 910

I have bad memories of some sitepoint books when I was learning PHP, there were many errors and the editing seemed shoddy, so I was pleasantly suprised when I read JQuery Novice to Ninja.

While it is designed so that each section builds up on the previous section and you gain knowledge as you go, as a reference it also works well, but isn’t ideal in that capacity.

I had tried a few other books and online tutorials before I received this book and still didn’t ‘get it’. This was the first book that made it click for me, so that itself is a good indication of how useful it was to me.

Once you have read it and understood, you will probably outgrow it but the JQuery website can probably take up the slack from that point onwards.

The book starts with an existing website and then bolts on all the bells and whistles in a backwards compatible way to make the user experience better. I like the pushing of progressive enhancement, which is an industry best practice, and which is needed for people with screen readers and similar accessibility tools. This still seems pretty rare in many Javascript tutorials of any description these days though.

The only downside I can see is that as a treeware (hardcopy) book is that it is fixed in time for the current language level which is 1.4 so any changes, which there so far are fairly few, will make learning from the book harder as time goes on.

Overall, I would give it 9 out of 10 and only because I don’t like giving stuff 10 due to leaving no room for improvement.