Book Review: jQuery Enlightenment

About a month ago I had the pleasure of reading “jQuery Enlightenment” by Cody Lindley, a truly excellent book any Web Developer from beginner to advanced should have on their to-read list. Now I don’t usually enjoy reading books about code as they are usually as dull as dishwater; just something you have to get through before you can get onto the interesting part of making it work for you; jQuery Enlightenment is different.

It starts by going through the basic concepts behind jQuery and how to use it, if you are already a jQuery developer you could skip this, but as it’s packed full of short concise information you never know what you may learn. The book covers all aspects of jQuery you will need to get you started plus much more, from selecting, manipulating and traversing DOM elements all the way through to plug-ins and best practices.

There were countless times while reading I thought to myself “Well, I didn’t know you could do that!”, here’s one of my favorites:

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jQuery(function($){
    $("#testanchor").bind("keypress mouseenter focus", function(e){
        //Event fires keypress, mouseenter and focus
        console.log(e.type);
        //Do stuff....
        return false;
    });
});

The bind() method can accept more than one event type, so the above function fires when any one of the listed events is detected on our #testanchor. I can’t remember the number of times where I’ve used multiple binds on the same element to achieve the same effect.

The book is packed full of useful code snippets like the one above that will save you time and effort when it comes to jQuery development. Being only 123 pages long it’s a fairly quick read, and it’s always great to have on hand as a reference when needed.

Grab it from here as an eBook for $15 or hard copies are available from lulu.com if you prefer that.