Book Review: jQuery 2.0 Development Cookbook

jQuery 2.x is a new improved version of the most popular JavaScript library. Specifically, 2.x does not support legacy browsers such as IE6-8 but works with all modern browsers and in Node, browser extensions (Google Chrome add-ons, Mozilla XUL apps and Firefox extensions), and other non-browser environments (Firefox OS apps, Chrome OS apps, Windows 8 Store apps, BlackBerry 10 WebWorks apps, PhoneGap/Cordova apps, Apple UIWebView class, Microsoft WebBrowser control).

jQuery 2.0 took 10 months in the making. The 2.0.0 file is 12 percent smaller than the 1.9.1 file. An app that only uses JSONP for $.ajax() and does not need to calculate offsets or positions of elements can exclude the offset and ajax/xhr modules. Considering all these new features in jQuery 2.x and my interest in the cookbook style of books that usually present key areas of a topic through practical examples or recipes, I was excited when I received a copy of ebook of jQuery 2.0 Development Cookbook by Leon Revill, from Packt to review.

I was disappointed with the contents. There was hardly any material specific to jQuery 2.0. There was just one reference to the word "jQuery 2.0" in the actual content! It is probably a challenge these days to write books on topics that have a short shelf-life. The title of the book seems to be a marketing ploy to make the book relevant.

Except for a few "recipes" (code samples 6.2 [second recipe in Chapter 6], 6.7, 7.3, 8.4, 9.4, 9.5), I found the majority of them too simplistic, unimpressive and unhelpful for practical use. The output of the code samples (which can be downloaded from the Packt site) is not self-explanatory. Some code samples require PHP to work.  The code could have been designed to use public Web APIs instead.

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