Book Review: jQuery in Action

A few years ago, when I first got into ASP.NET development, I worked on a project that used the Ajax Controls Toolkit. I was not a JavaScript person, and my experience with the Toolkit and all its idiosyncrasies left a very bitter taste in my mouth for ‘client-side’ web development. For many of the projects after that, I worked on the back end of the system – the database, data model and business logic, and eventually the controllers and web services. We had a UI guy who tackled the JavaScript stuff and worked ‘magic’ there.

A couple of months ago, I got involved in a project which had a very large existing code base, with a lot of jQuery and my UI guy was nowhere to be found. Before I knew it, I was neck deep in it, and drowning fast. I muddled through the project and got it out the door, but I realized that I could no longer have this gap in my education. I also realized, by working on that existing code base, that jQuery was nothing like the JavaScript and Toolkit I once struggled with, and it was really freaking powerful.

It turns out that back in early 2010, I had ordered jQuery In Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz during some book buying binge, but never read it. It got loaned out to a couple of people at work, and I didn’t see it for the longest time. It wasn’t until I finished working on that big jQuery project that I even remembered that I still had it. I tracked it down, and it flew to the top of my reading list.

I wish I had read this book a three years ago. jQuery is really powerful. And it’s really big.  jQuery in Action did a great job of introducing me to the core concepts, and giving me a refresher on basic JavaScript. Ok, not a refresher – an introduction. The unfortunate part is that I ordered this book in early 2010, which meant the version I have is the first edition published in 2008. The second edition came out in May 2010. The first edition covered up to jQuery 1.2. The second edition covers jQuery 1.4.  As I recall, there are some fairly major differences in jQuery between 1.2 and 1.4, but more importantly, there have been major changes in browsers. Internet Explorer was just on Version 7 when the book was written, and a lot of time had to be spent by developers to account for the way IE6 worked, and to a slightly lesser extent, IE7. With IE9 now out and promising “It just works”, I would like to think that jQuery will have gotten even easier in the last few years. The first edition of jQuery in Action has quite a few asides that detail the frustrations developers had with IE6 & 7, and I get the impression that the authors would have little good to say about Internet Explorer in conversation.

The book is well organized and the coverage of the core concepts appropriate for a beginning jQuery developer as long as you have a solid background in web development. It even has a very good appendix on JavaScript, which was invaluable to someone like me with a large gap in their knowledge of the subject. They build a large number of exercises into the book as well. Since I was reading the book whilst commuting, I didn’t get a chance to try them, but I think I understood them well enough from the written copy. At the very least, I know they are out there and I can download them when I get a chance to give them a try.

What I find amazing about this book (and jQuery), is how many times I thought back to projects I already have in production, and said “Wow, the UI could be so much better”, or “If I had only known about jQuery, the whole architecture would have changed.” The former makes me happy that I can now say “Yes, we can do that.” more often to clients. The latter makes me question my skills as a software architect. I had never even considered some of the approaches presented in the book, and not only would the UI have been more user friendly, it would have been faster and more reliable. I’m disappointed in myself for not taking the time to learn about jQuery before now. I can rationalize all I want about being busy with other things (like learning Windows Azure, MVC, WPF, writing 4 books, etc.) but the truth is that I considered the UI side to be the ‘poofy’ stuff and let other people handle it. The UI, I thought, was just for displaying the results of all the ‘hard work’ done on the back end.

No longer. Reading jQuery in Action has opened my eyes to the fact that I have to know all the layers, at least well enough to know what is possible. I have no doubt that there will be aspects (especially in CSS) that require an artist’s touch (which no amount of reading is going to give me), but I will now treat jQuery as a first class language in solving client problems. I still have qualms about jQuery, mainly from the testability standpoint, but I do like the idea of unobtrusive JavaScript which will allow me to keep a separation of concerns and allow me to build up a personal collection of functions that I trust just work.

I will, at some point, go out and get the second edition of this book to see what has changed in the last few years, and to reinforce my basic knowledge of JavaScript and jQuery. With HTML 5 and JavaScript coming at developers like an out of control freight train, jQuery in Action is a great way to get started and to get up to speed.