jQuery: A Beginner's Guide

I'm very much pleased with it!

Years ago, I floundered through books on JavaScript, hoping to find the remedy for my ineptitude with understanding the basics of programming. When I encountered John Pollock's beginner's guide to JavaScript, I experienced an epiphany where I finally comprehended the basics of JavaScript programming. From there, I continued to read JavaScript books with greater ease and have done coding for Web form validation.Recently, faced with the need to extend into jQuery, I found myself encountering books that emphasized both JavaScript and jQuery or that focused exclusively on plugins (i.e., the book jQuery for Designers). What I wanted was a book that would give me comprehensive coverage of the basics of jQuery while also positioning me for not only using plugins, but also creating them: John Pollock's book came through in spades once again.For beginner coders, it is important to note that you need to have basic skills in HTML and CSS (in that order) before reading this book, and should have some background with JavaScript for optimal learning. HTML5 and CSS3 are the latest standards, and advisable to learn as your first go-to.His book comes with exercises along with questions and answers at the end of each chapter to help clarify major concepts. He also has convenient and relevant lists, such as list items of CSS selectors used in jQuery, listings of jQuery events, lists of operators, charts of animation methods, and the like.The coding he works on includes the making of a video game that measures how fast you click on a randomly appearing object. He also has code for inserting randomly selected quotes from a predefined list into your Web page.Furthermore, he covers numerous animation events, such as slideToggle, fadeToggle, toggleClass, fade in, fade out, and many others--and even explores debugging through console, browser logs, and alerts.In addition, there is a chapter on Ajax that deals with Ajax commands for retrieving HTML files, XML files, text files, and jSON files. Pollock also delves into PHP related Ajax commands, which would require the book reader to have some basic knowledge of PHP in order for this segment to be relatively lucid, although not vital to the overall learning process.As for plugins, which was one of the highlights of the book for me, he covered a plugin called Chosen, that beautifies standard select boxes (either multiple select or single). He shows you to how make plugins compatible with other jQuery code. He even demonstrates how to make a plugin that allows the user to insert his or her own values, including allowing the user to create his or her own callback function for added flexibility. For beginners, plugins will make your coding experience much more streamlined, as they are pre-built code snippets that you can tweak, based on documentation--and they are easy to implement... as simple as adding a couple of links to your HTML file and small snippets of code.All in all, Pollock's book was the ideal go-to for starting out with jQuery, especially after having some background with JavaScript. You'll learn all of the basics of the jQuery language and of Ajax and the undergirding of jQuery plugins. This is a complete introductory education to jQuery.