Review of "JavaScript & jQuery: The Missing Manual, Second Edition" by David Sawyer McFarland; O’Reilly Media

Disclaimer: I'm a member of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program and as such, this book was freely provided to me by the editor.

David Sawyer McFarland has been building websites since 1995. In "JavaScript & jQuery: The Missing Manual", he tries to teach javascript and jQuery to web designers or beginner programmers so that they can build highly interactive web pages. This book is clearly aimed to people who know a little bit of HTML and CSS but want to add some dynamics to their pages.

The first two parts of the book teach the reader basics of javascript and jQuery. It begins with very basic things like "What's a Computer Program" and finishes with a tutorial to write an animated dashboard in jQuery. I have to say that I skipped most of these 200 pages as I already know most of what is written here.

The third part of the book gives lots of tips for improving images and navigation in your website. There are lots of tutorial which cover the most frequent cases that you find on modern websites. I liked the chapter on web forms for it introduce some very useful techniques for having smarter forms and interfaces.

The fourth part was clearly the most interesting to me: Ajax. David goes back to the basics of request/response and explains trough simple tutorials how Ajax works with jQuery. All you need to know to be able to make Ajax with jQuery is here! Moreover, the next chapter show how to use these new skills with popular web services from Flickr or Google Maps.

Finally, the last part "Tips, Tricks, and Troubleshooting" explain how to work with jQuery and javascript efficiently in a daily basis with things like traversing the DOM, regex and debugging.

I was a bit disappointed at the beginning as the first 200 pages are really very basic but then, I learned lots of practical tips that I will be able to use in all my web projects.