“Head First jQuery” is written in the “Head First” style and is aimed at beginners and career changers who already have a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS, as well as programming experience.
As a computer science graduate, I enjoy reading books from the Head First series to get an initial overview. You learn quickly enough to be able to apply things yourself. This was also the case with this book.
In each chapter, a new assignment from a client is introduced, which the reader then has to complete themselves under the guidance of the authors. The knowledge learned is thus applied immediately and is also tested in many exercises.
A large part of the jQuery world is covered: HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, XML, JSON, PHP, MySQL, jQueryUI, and Google Maps as an example API.
This is successful and interesting in most places.
I am giving it only 4 stars for the following reasons:
- In the book, very basic programming concepts such as variables and for-loops are explained in detail. The authors likely intended readers without programming experience as their target audience. In my opinion, this is pointless and a waste of space, as no one should be advised to learn programming with jQuery.
- Some parts were also a little boring (e.g., the animations and the timers).
- jQuery is part of the presentation layer. This should only be used for display purposes, and business processes (business logic) should not be modeled here. In the book, this principle is violated in many places for pedagogical reasons, without the reader being informed that they are learning a “Don’t” or a “Bad practice.”
The book:
- Ryan Benedetti, Ronan Cranley
- Head First jQuery
- O’Reilly
- 2011
See also the review on Amazon
