I was first introduced to jQuery, oh.. somewhere around a few months ago. Having a strong background in niche marketing and then front-end web development (design/xhtml/css, etc), my “programming knowledge” had been limited to a basic ability to editing basic PHP, etc, and “making things work”.

A few client projects were calling for a bit of extra user-side interactivity, though, and I knew it was time to do some learning. I did some research and discovered jQuery. It looked really interesting and, being completely new to Javascript from a developer’s perspective, it offered me the ability to give my clients what they wanted without having to spend a whole lot more time than I had to learn how to do it from scratch.

After a bit more research and the discovery that WordPress, my current development platform of choice, now comes packaged with jQuery, I was sold. I began scouring the web for tutorials and started putting into practice what I’d learned.

Happy with the results and eager to learn more, I checked to see if there were any books available on the subject. A quick search on Amazon (at the time) left me disappointed. I kept looking, though, and not long after discovered that there was a brand new book on the horizon, appropriately titled, “Learning jQuery”.

I emailed the publishers and they graciously agreed to send me an advance copy of the book. It arrived not too long after. I had planned to set aside a few days to pour through it, but life had a few other ideas and a couple of trips, along with some rather big business moves, took away any spare time I had.

As such, I haven’t been able to review the book in detail, yet, but I’ve skimmed it through and am fully satisfied that it will be just the hands on experience I need to open up the jQuery platform to some healthy experimentation.

Once I’m situated in the new office, I (or someone else on the team) will be going through the book in detail and we’ll be sharing our experiences then.

Meanwhile, full credit to the jQuery team for developing an excellent platform. Keep up the good work guys! Also, full credit to Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg for their excellent work on the book and to PACKT Publishing for another fine release.

To get your copy of the book, buy Learning jQuery on PACKT’s website or on Amazon (a tad more expensive, but nice if you have Amazon Prime).

Until next time,

-Jonathan Wold