Book Review: jQuery UI 1.7
Packt Publishing seems to be one of the leading publishers of client-side programming books -- and good ones. My first experience with them was the excellent Learning jQuery. Now, I've just finished jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery.
Readers of my blog know that I use jQuery a great deal: it's become indispensable to the way I develop applications. But the jQuery UI...it always felt like the poor cousin of the tonier jQuery library. Still, the appeal is undeniable: it works with, and in the same way as, jQuery. But the assortment of "widgets" is nowhere near as complete as the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library or its offspring, ExtJS. So I read this book in the hopes that it would ignite a love for jQuery UI. It has.
The book itself, written by Dan Wellman, is a model of lucidity. It begins with an excellent introduction to the library. I wish that all technical books placed their subject in context as well as this one does. For that matter, Learning jQuery is also excellent. Perhaps it's something that Packt is feeding their authors. Or perhaps, as I really suspect, the Packt editors do an excellent job of more than just acquiring authors and leaving them on their own.
Too often, that is the formula used by technical book publishers. I can attest to the benefit of a good, demanding editor. Writers suffer from the tendency to fall in love with our own words. When one finds a particularly satisfying phrase, we use it -- whether it serves the needs of the book or not.
A good editor stands in place of the reader, gently (or not) prodding, admonishing, suggesting -- in short, editing to ensure that the finished product will be interesting and useful. jQuery UI 1.7 is. (You can see the publisher's page for the book here.)
The next chapter is the CSS framework, explaining the idea behind themes that give the library components their look and feel. Chapters 3-7 detail individual widgets: tabs, accordions, dialog boxes, sliders, datepickers, and progress bars -- all admirably detailed, describing their functionality and use. The next four chapters leave the world of widgets for the world of what Dan Wellman calls "interaction helpers". These are the built-in capabilities that enable drag and drop, resizing, selecting, and sorting -- again, all wonderfully detailed. The final chapter explains how to use jQuery UI's "effects" -- those bits of eye candy that may not change the world -- but make it a slightly nicer place to visit.
Are all my concerns about the jQuery UI library resolved? No. It still needs more widgets -- and did we absolutely have to have those meter-long-hyphenated-class-names? But the dedication that jQuery and the jQuery UI inspire leave me confident that the "user interface library for jQuery" will ultimately live up to its name.
Thanks for the review, Hal. Coincidentally, I was cleaning out my inbox and found an invite from Packt Publishing to buy the print and e-book versions at a discount. I forgot about it as the day went on, and stumbled upon this post by chance. Seems like the planets have aligned and told me to buckle down and get this baby. I would agree that the dedication of an editor can make or break a book's quality level.
jQuery is a JavaScript library that stands out among its competitors because it is faster, focuses on writing less code, and is very extensible. http://www.videorolls.com/watch/jQuery In this talk, I will explore jQuery and how to use it. I will start off talking about the basics of using jQuery. Then, I will talk about building plugins. Finally, time permitting, I will take apart some plugins and talk about how they work, and I will show the nitty gritty details of the library. Speaker: Dmitri Gaskin Dmitri Gaskin drinks code with his cereal for breakfast every morning. He's a jQuery whiz and a Drupal know-it-all. He contributes patches for both Open Source projects. In the Drupal world, he maintains many modules, is on the security team, and is involved in the upcoming Summer of Code as a mentor and administrator. Dmitri has given many talks on Drupal and jQuery, in such places as Logitech, Drupalcon and live on a radio show out of LA When Dmitri isn't coding, a very rare occurrence, he is playing and composing contemporary music. And attending classes in the 6th grade. (He's only 12.)
