Learning from jQuery

Preface

Many developers are comfortable with using the jQuery library, which adds features to JavaScript and makes a lot of tasks easier, but they are slightly less confident when using JavaScript without jQuery. This could be because they don’t like the syntax of JavaScript and so try to avoid writing pure JavaScript as much as possible, or it could just be because they’re hoping that they’ll never have to work on a project where they can’t use jQuery. Whatever the reason, this can result in the parts of their code that aren’t using jQuery being inefficient or incorrect.

If any of this sounds like you, then this book provides an opportunity for you to expand your knowledge of the bits of JavaScript that jQuery covers up for you. In the first four chapters, we’ll cover event handling, prototypes, working with the DOM, and AJAX. Chapter 5 is about conventions in JavaScript, and covers some common conventions and patterns in JavaScript. There are also two appendixes: Appendix A aims to teach JavaScript to someone who has never written it without jQuery before, and Appendix B highlights some useful tools that you can use to aid you when coding.

You can find all the major functions from this book, such as the AJAX and event functions, and some additional code samples, on this GitHub repo.

Who This Book Is For

This book is targeted at developers who know jQuery, but who don’t yet feel confident in their JavaScript knowledge or would just like to know more. You don’t need to know everything there is to know about jQuery, as I’ll be explaining what something does if it isn’t already obvious—for example, I wouldn’t explain what .fadeIn() does, as it is descriptive enough that it doesn’t require explanation.

Who This Book Isn’t For

This book assumes a basic knowledge of jQuery, and I wouldn’t recommend reading it if you have no experience in JavaScript or jQuery. If that describes you, I would recommend finding a basic JavaScript book such as Michael Morrison’s Head First JavaScript, David Sawyer McFarland’s JavaScript and jQuery: The Missing Manual, or Shelley Powers’s Learning JavaScript. For a more comprehensive exploration, try David Flanagan’s JavaScript: The Definitive Guide.

While it certainly won’t hurt, this book wasn’t written for you if you already consider yourself fairly good with JavaScript, and you may not learn much. You won’t have covered everything in the book (especially in Chapter 5), but a lot of it will likely be material you already know.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

Constant width bold

Shows commands or other text that should be typed literally by the user.

Constant width italic

Shows text that should be replaced with user-supplied values or by values determined by context.

Tip

This icon signifies a tip, suggestion, or general note.

Warning

This icon indicates a warning or caution.

Using Code Examples

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if this book includes code examples, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

We appreciate, but do not require, attribution. An attribution usually includes the title, author, publisher, and ISBN. For example: “Learning from jQuery by Callum Macrae (O’Reilly). Copyright 2013 Callum Macrae, 978-1-449-33519-9.”

If you feel your use of code examples falls outside fair use or the permission given above, feel free to contact us at [e-mail].

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Acknowledgments

Thank you to David DeMello, Eric Hamilton, Cody Lindley, and Ralph Whitbeck, the technical reviewers without whom this book wouldn’t be half what it is now. Thanks also to my editors, Meghan Blanchette and Simon St.Laurent, and everyone else at O’Reilly Media.

A massive thanks to all the folks at webdevRefinery for motivating me to write this book in the first place.

Finally, I’d like to thank John Resig and everyone else who has contributed to the wonderful jQuery library. Without jQuery, I would be stuck spending half my time debugging Internet Explorer issues!