Ask YC: Advice good books to learn jQuery

9 points·es··5 comments

I really want to find a book with good complex real-life examples.

I have all three "JQuery Reference", "Learning JQuery" and "JQuery in Action"…

Of the three, "JQuery Reference" is the best — granted, you can access similar like reference material online, but I found it was nice to have in book form, with more examples, so you could leaf through when not gazing at a monitor…

"Learning JQuery" is decent, but dated, and many of the examples given use deprecated features. Also, some of the examples are quite contrived, and accomplish presentation tasks that I would never ever implement as JS. But my philosophy on JS is that it should enhance, and not be a replacement, so YMMV.

"JQuery in Action" — wish I would have foregone purchase of, not that it's bad, just that it seems to be packed with lots of verbiage and ends up being a poor man's ORA style "JQuery in a Nutshell".

Manning's "jQuery in Action" is quite good and has some decent examples. You can pick up a PDF copy from their site for very little.

A good intro is "Learning jQuery" by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg although the jQuery web site offers some very good introductory material. I have found the "jQuery reference guide" (same authors) helpful to have around though.

I've always self taught myself stuff through example code, blogs, and misc web resources. It's typically more up-to-date than books as far as web languages are concerned... However, I'm sure there's one or two worth grabbing.

http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page

And it's free.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com