Customer Rating: 
Summary: jQuery is the cats pjyamas for Javascript DOM manipulation.
Comment: If you've ever tried to do DOM manipulation of a web page and had to deal with browser quirks you'll find jQuery and this book will make you want to look at web development again with a reinvigorated spirit. jQuery does a brilliant job of levelling the playing field giving you a Javascript library that abstracts away the complexites behind a common API. It's extensible to via plug-ins, so the scope for enhancement is there.
The authors have a wry sense of humour that is refreshing and informative. Maybe this books adage should be.. "The labs are worth a thousand words". Whenever things get a bit heavy going, you can run the lab examples and get your heads around things. It's a great way to hone your jQuery skills.
Chapter 8 contains some of the most interesting stuff for me. It covers using jQuery with Ajax. For this you'll need to host the apps in Tomcat. A familiarity with Java helps a bit here, so you'll understand the conversations revolving around servlets. (Though I think PHP will do to).
If you've used SAX, JDOM or similar parser technologies on the Java server-side, you'll appreciate how succint and cool this technology is. You can achieve big things with minimal effort. As well as being able to do XPath type node selection, you can do CSS style selector syntax matching. (Try Googling on selectors and look at the pattern table in the W3C docs).
If your a novice or a rusty Javascipt developer, the Appendices give a good refresher on the likes of closures. All in all this is a good book with excellent examples which I thoroughly recommend.
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