Learning jQuery Book Details

Posted on by

This week Jonathan Chaffer and I finished the book’s first draft and sent the last chapter to the publisher, so I thought I’d take this opportunity before the revisions start rolling in to provide some more details. The book’s full title is Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques. Learning jQuery bookAs the subtitle suggests, we’ve written the book to be accessible to those with a web-design background who haven’t had much, if any experience, with coding. But we think it will provide plenty of useful information for intermediate-level scripters as well.

The book is being published by PACKT Publishing, based in Manchester Birmingham, UK. They’re a relative newcomer to the publishing world, but already they’ve managed to put together a pretty impressive group of books, many of which explore open-source software projects. They seem passionate about supporting these projects beyond publishing books about them. In fact, they’ve introduced a royalty scheme that gives a percentage of sales to the open-source project that a book is written about. So, if you buy this book, you’ll be directly supporting the jQuery project. :)

The expected publication date is sometime this July, and the book is already available for pre-order at a 20% discount. The publisher plans to sell a PDF-version of the book, too, but they haven’t set it up for pre-order just yet.

Barring the unlikely major structural change during our revision phase, the (concise) table of contents should look like something like this:

  1. Introducing jQuery
    1. Getting Started
  2. Exploring jQuery
    1. Selectors, or How to Get Anything You Want
    2. Events, or How to Pull the Trigger
    3. Effects, or How to Add Flair to Your Actions
    4. DOM Manipulation, or How to Change Your Page on Command
    5. AJAX, or How to Make Your Site Buzzword Compliant
  3. Using jQuery
    1. Table Manipulation
    2. Forms with Function
    3. Shufflers and Rotators
  4. Examining jQuery
    1. Selector Expressions
    2. DOM Traversal Methods
    3. DOM Manipulation Methods
    4. Event Methods
    5. Effect Methods
    6. AJAX Methods
    7. Miscellaneous Methods
    8. Plug-ins
  5. Appendices
    1. Online Resources
    2. Development Tools
    3. JavaScript Closures

Update:

We’re making good progress on the revisions, and it looks like we’re going to hit our target publication date of July. The publisher has just made the PDF version of the book available for pre-order at a 15% discount. Also, they have a “Book and eBook Bundle” at an enormously discounted price (US $36.79).

21 thoughts on “Learning jQuery Book Details

  1. Dave, I appreciate the vote of confidence.I’d like to get reacquainted with my wife and kids before jumping into another book project, though. :) That said, some “pros” might enjoy this book, too, especially for its reference section.

    Thanks for the heads-up, Matthew! Fixed now.

  2. Thanks, Mike.

    Since the publication date is July, people should definitely plan ahead and start saving their money so that they’ll be able to afford both Learning jQuery and the new Harry Potter book. I suspect that the two books are going to be right up there at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. Won’t it be exciting to see which one comes out ahead?

    In completely unrelated news, Jonathan and I are toying with the idea of changing the name of our book from Learning jQuery to Harvey Porter: Bork 7. What do you think?

  3. Enrique Melendez on said:

    sorry, but What is the point on publishing these kind of books when the official website should have a better “manual” (not only a brief API reference) on-line first?

    I think these books should be first on jquery.com as user manuals online and once the project is mature enough then and only then publish books about topics left. It is quite unfair when there are so many things to improve first on jquery.com to speed its spreading…

    Anyway, good luck!

  4. @Enrique: I don’t particularly see anything wrong with publishing the book now. I am actually quite excited to get my hands on a copy of it. As far as jQuery documentation, it appears that several people (given the number of sites using jQuery) have been able to use jQuery.com/api/ and the documentation link above without a problem. Plus there is a good amount of people that support jQuery and its users and are more than willing to help out others when needed. I think publishing the book is a fantastic idea to be used reference, learning guide as well as to spread word about jQuery. Just my .02 cents.

  5. Pingback: Gian Carlo Mingati » Blog Archive » jQuery, the book

  6. I am also curious about 1.1.3, but maybe the “Discuss” area (Google Groups) would yield a better response. I’m going to go post over there.

  7. Someone recently asked about 1.1.3 in the “Discuss” area, too. John Resig replied that he has been traveling a lot lately and also fell ill last week, so he’s still trying to catch up with stuff. I suspect it won’t be too long, though.

  8. Ramesh on said:

    how can i add plugin’s functions in to jQuery function, lets say i want to start writing fucntion into Jquery, how can i start that… to some extent i know how to use jquery, buti need to add functions to Jquery , should i require any frame supported for that or its just writign java scri[ts in jqery manner… pls suggets me

  9. Quintin on said:

    After reading this part of the description I went and got myself a copy of the book.

    “… we’ve written the book to be accessible to those with a web-design background who haven’t had much, if any experience, with coding.”

    I found this to be misleading for starters – sorry if I offend the authors but that is my personal point of view.

    The first 2 chapters made me think that I was on my way to understand the subject. Every line of code is well explained in a way that the beginner can digest it and make sense of it. Sadly to say it is a short lived experience – 2 chapters to be exact.

    Once you progress a few pages into chapter 3 (“Events—How to Pull the Trigger”), the presumption that the book is intended for the beginner/novice audience becomes unclear. The code gets leaner and introduces more advanced coding techniques where an understanding of Javascript (or a deeper understanding of jQuery) becomes necessary.

    I would recommend to those in a similar position as mine to first become familiar with the basics of Javascript before diving into jQuery. A lot of you might disagree with what I say but I guess you must have a longer background in programming which will make your arguments bias. I just fail to see the likelihood of a person with web-design background to just fall into jQuery and make sense of it. After all, when we talk about web-design in general – we are talking about people that work with CSS and HTML. The programming in my 8 year experience as a web-designer has always been taken care of by members within the team that were employed for their programming skills. As a freelancer most of us would scout the web looking for some ready-made script to do what you want it to do and be left in the dark as to how it works.

    So, to suggest that this title is aimed at “ those with a web-design background who haven’t had much, if any experience, with coding” is debatable.

    Lynda.com features a title called: “JavaScript Essential Training (2007) with Dori Smith “ and I would recommend checking out the first few chapters just for background before it becomes too involved.