Review of Learning JQuery
Written by on August 10th, 2007 in Ajax News.
My colleague Brian Dillard has written a review of Learning JQuery:
Having spent most of the Ajax era at a large dot-com writing custom JavaScript backed by Prototype and some really solid internal libraries, I’m astounded by the staggering number of competing frameworks that have been quietly chugging along while I was busy elsewhere. It’s time to play catch-up. Helping me in that mission are Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg, authors of the new “Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques.” The title’s a bit of a mouthful, but this beginner’s tutorial offers the same elegance and simplicity as the jQuery JavaScript framework itself. Assuming a solid grasp of basic UI technologies (XHTML, CSS and JavaScript) on the part of their audience, Chaffer and Swedberg dive right into the basics of using jQuery to speed development of RIAs.
There’s a lot to like about jQuery the library:
- The CSS selector-based DOM traversal provides a single, unified method of manipulating your markup and data. It’s less flexible than Prototype’s grab bag of DOM methods, but it’s easier to master. All of the major frameworks are scrambling to optimize their DOM traversal methods for speed and scalability, so it will be interesting to see how jQuery evolves.
- The crazy method-chaining allows simple, elegant DOM manipulation. Grab a node reference, change some visual properties and add behaviors - all on a single line.
- The stripped-down base library and plug-in framework offer an attractive solution to feature bloat and gigantic code footprints. The base jQuery library provides the underpinnings, but the plug-ins provide the bells and whistles one at a time.
- The organization of the jQuery object itself keeps the global namespace free and other libraries working properly. jQuery doesn’t rewire core JavaScript objects, either, so it plays well with legacy code written in POJ.
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/142764372/review-of-learning-jquery