The Night Reader said
I agree with the first reviewer: this book not only presents its material poorly but presents material it shouldn't be presenting in the first place.
jQuery can add much value to a Web site. jQuery can also add pointless sizzle that degrades the user experience. You don't need jQuery to solve many of the 'problems' posed in this book. In fact, I'd recommend that you DON'T use jQuery to solve those problems. Better, simpler solutions exist.
The author appears to have trawled the Web for 'cool' jQuery effects and then compiled implementations of them in his book. I wish he would have instead analyzed the best uses of jQuery and then presented efficient 'recipes' for applying them to solve actual problems.
Now THAT book would have been useful. This one isn't.
Jeff Parker said
I'd been looking forward to this book for quite a while. Imagine my disappointment when I got it and realized many of the "recipes" were pointless. Things like styling a breadcrumb menu with jQuery don't make any sense. I'm having a problem imagining many scenarios where you need to dynamically apply styles to breadcrumbs with javascript instead of just defining them in your stylesheet from the beginning. I mean, the subtitle says "A Problem Solution Approach" but I get the very real feeling that developers relying upon the "Solutions" found in this book are actually creating more Problems for themselves down the road.
This book has woefully too many similar instances where jQuery is used to add an extra layer of complexity to a simpler technique web developers already know. Additionally, many of the examples contain poor coding practices and the validation section is entirely a waste considering the strength and support for the validation plugin. I could go on, but I won't.
I love Apress books and I love jQuery but I'm just confused about what happened with this book!
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