Learning jQuery Book Details

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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).

13 thoughts on “Learning jQuery Book Details”

  3. Karl Swedberg on said:

    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.

  5. Karl Swedberg on said:

    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?

  6. 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!

  7. Mike on said:

    @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.

  8. Dominik Hahn on said:

    Great news! I am not going to buy it because of the great online resources but it should be useful for some. :)

  9. John Farrar on said:

    1. Is the library up to 1.3 yet?

    2. Have the drag and drop issues been fixed for the IE issue with Interface yet?

  10. Mike on said:

    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.

  11. Karl Swedberg on said:

    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.