Professional jQuery

Book Preface

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS JAVASCRIPT has undergone a remarkable transformation. Where once it was a “toy” language relegated to secondary status it’s now one of the most important programming languages in the world. With the ongoing importance of Ajax-based development and the rise of full-featured JavaScript libraries, the stigma surrounding JavaScript has all but vanished. As easily the most popular and beginner-friendly library, jQuery is responsible for the lion’s share of that progress.

jQuery is more than just a beginner’s choice; however, it’s in use at some of the largest organizations in the world, adding interactivity to billions of page views every month. Amazon, IBM, Twitter, NBC, Best Buy and Dell are just a few of the companies using jQuery in production.

With a web-scale footprint it should come as no surprise that jQuery is evolving at web speed. 2011 saw no less than three major releases and the community surrounding jQuery continues to blossom as developers the world over contribute bug fi xes, plugins and work on related projects like jQuery UI and QUnit. This flurry of activity ensures that jQuery presents a full-featured option for any developer looking to do world-class JavaScript development.

This is true no matter what programming philosophy or technique is followed: jQuery is prominently featured in the front end of Java/Spring, PHP, .NET, Ruby on Rails, and Python/Django stacks all over the Web.

If you have experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, then this book is for you. This book will expand your jQuery knowledge by focusing on the core library with the benefi t of strong core JavaScript expertise coloring the lessons. The first few chapters will help you to set up a development environment, and reviews important JavaScript concepts. Chapters 3 to 7 examine the jQuery core concepts. The second half of the book focuses on applying jQuery in the real world, detailing jQuery UI, plugin development, templates, unit testing, best practices, and JavaScript design patterns applied with jQuery.

Hopefully, this book will give you the hardcore jQuery chops you’ll need to solve whatever problems the Web throws at you.