Blog » Learning jQuery Book Details
Posted April 18th, 2007 by Karl SwedbergThis 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. 
As 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:
- Introducing jQuery
- Getting Started
- Exploring jQuery
- Selectors, or How to Get Anything You Want
- Events, or How to Pull the Trigger
- Effects, or How to Add Flair to Your Actions
- DOM Manipulation, or How to Change Your Page on Command
- AJAX, or How to Make Your Site Buzzword Compliant
- Using jQuery
- Table Manipulation
- Forms with Function
- Shufflers and Rotators
- Examining jQuery
- Selector Expressions
- DOM Traversal Methods
- DOM Manipulation Methods
- Event Methods
- Effect Methods
- AJAX Methods
- Miscellaneous Methods
- Plug-ins
- Appendices
- Online Resources
- Development Tools
- 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).
April 19th, 2007 at 5:25 am
Brilliant! Can’t wait. Can you write a book for pro’s too?
April 19th, 2007 at 7:37 am
Your link to Packt is wrong - you’re missing a ‘k’.
April 19th, 2007 at 9:56 am
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.
April 19th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
Looking forward to the release! Sounds like a pretty good read.
April 19th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Thanks
April 19th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
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?
April 20th, 2007 at 5:17 am
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!
April 20th, 2007 at 10:39 am
@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.
April 21st, 2007 at 9:03 am
Great news! I am not going to buy it because of the great online resources but it should be useful for some.
April 21st, 2007 at 12:00 pm
test
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:11 am
[…] E’ ufficiale e a luglio uscirà il libro “Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques” di Karl Swedberg e Jonathan Chaffer e allora si che inizieremo a fare sul serio, col jQuery. Anche perchè qui in ufficio sono tutti entusiasti (ho fatto delle demo con dei piccoli snippet di codice per qualche progetto qui e lì), ma altrettanto riluttanti ad usare la documentation o le risorse in rete perchè anche se è fatta molto bene e ricca di esempi, non parte proprio da zero, ma dà per assodati alcuni princìpi e se non si è fatto alcun ‘esperimento’ non è che jQuery sia così immediato. Come dice il titolo, il libro è scritto per essere comprensibile per tutti coloro che hanno un background da ‘web-designer’ che non hanno molta - o nessuna - esperienza col javascript. Consideriamo che questo è un ‘altro modo’ di scrivere javascript e appunto, la potenza stà nella sintassi che va ‘digerita’ e un bel libro aiuta molto. […]
April 26th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
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?
April 26th, 2007 at 3:43 pm
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.
April 26th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
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.
May 26th, 2007 at 3:12 am
Actually, I think Packt are based in Birmingham, not Manchester.
May 26th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Andy, you are correct. Duly noted, and fixed. Thanks for that.
February 8th, 2008 at 3:39 am
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
February 8th, 2008 at 8:50 am
Hi Ramesh,
Mike Alsup has written a very helpful tutorial called A Plugin Development Pattern. That should help get you started with extended jQuery’s functionality.
April 25th, 2008 at 6:00 am
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.