Packt Publishing were kind enough to send me a copy of the jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide, by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. The book is intended to be a comprehensive reference for the library, aimed at intermediate to advanced readers.

The first point I should make about this book is that it is not intended for users who are new to the jQuery library – this is not a book full of tutorials. If that’s what you’re looking for, you should check out Learning jQuery 1.3 instead, by the same authors.

The book is organised into eleven chapters, covering (amongst other things) selectors, DOM traversal and manipulation, events, effects, and AJAX. The whole library is covered (as you would expect from a reference guide).

Each method in the library has its parameters documented. This is surprisingly helpful – many jQuery methods can be overloaded for various purposes, and this feature of the book is a great help towards learning the possibilities of each method. In fact, one of the take-home points for me was that many methods now support anonymous functions as parameters, offering lots of flexibility.

Next, a bare bones code sample is shown to demonstrate the method. It is followed  by an explanation of the code sample, along with any ‘gotchas’ or quirks that you might experience. Multiple examples of code are shown where there might be different ways to use a particular method. The book really is quite exhaustive, and from that point of view offers great value for money.

Although this book works really well as a reference book, the surprise for me was that it didn’t just work well as a reference book. Reading through the book, I picked up a lot of hints and tips that will almost certainly change how I use jQuery. For example, I realised that my knowledge of selectors was sorely lacking. (Partly this was because I’d never bothered to learn the CSS3 selectors properly, but jQuery gives me a reason!)

Another excellent chapter for me was the last one, regarding plug in architecture. The structure of this chapter was a little different, basically walking the reader through the process of creating various types of plugin. Like the best technical books, this chapter actually inspired me to put the book down and write some code – surely a sign that it was doing its job properly!

It’s worthwhile to note that if you are considering purchasing a copy of this book, Packt will make a contribution to the jQuery project for every copy sold; so in buying this book, you’ll increase your own knowledge, and you’ll be directly helping the jQuery project too. For me, that’s one of the best reasons to buy.