Question: which book should I get "jQuery in Action
" by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz, or "Learning jQuery
" by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg?
Answer: Both are very good books. I am not new to JavaScript but I try not to get too involved in it, so am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination in JavaScript. However, since in my last project, with ASP.Net MVC, I needed to use jQuery a lot due to the need for a web-app that "feel" like a desktop app, so needed lots of Ajax, client-side DOM manipulation. So grabbed the book "Learning jQuery " first, read and studied it from cover-to-cover. It is an excellent resource and does not burden you with having to know JavaScript, although some rudimentary knowledge of it is beneficial, if not required. I was up an running writing jQuery in no time. After a few months saw “jQuery in Action ” on another colleagues office and peaked inside, and wow, asked myself why I did not grab this one first in stead. I can definitely recommend both but found myself getting more out of “jQuery in Action ”. I especially like the appendix “JavaScript that you need to know but might not!”. One of the key features that the “jQuery in Action ” gave me straight away was the great INDEX, believe it or not, it seemed to get me to what I wanted to know a lot faster and found some great pointers on jQuery chaining of functions.
Again both are good but prefer Bibeault’s and Katz’s take on it, great job guys!