jQuery seems to be gaining more and more momentum in the .NET Developer Community as a powerful and easy-to-use JavaScript Library. When developing my first ASP.NET MVC Web Application I started to learn jQuery as more of a necessary evil. The AjaxController didn't seem intutive and wasn't even close to being complete at the time so I abandon the idea of using it in favor of trying jQuery. I also was looking for a way to validate forms in MVC and jQuery was recommended by quite a few developers in the MVC Forums. Since then, I have rather enjoyed learning the power and more importantly, the simplicity of using jQuery to manipulate DOM objects as well as making AJAX Requests to the server.
Although the online jQuery documentation is not bad, it is also not easy to understand for beginners. I searched around for jQuery Tutorials and Samples on the Internet as well, but really didn't find anything that talked about jQuery from the ground up. As luck would have it, I found a really good book on jQuery, called jQuery in Action. This is a perfect book for beginners as it assumes no knowledge of jQuery. jQuery in Action begins by introducing the fundamentals of jQuery and then progressively builds upon those fundamentals so that by the end of the book you can do animation and effects, create your own plug-ins, utilize many of the utility functions in jQuery, perform asynchronous POST and GET Requests to the web server ( AJAX ), and leverage existing jQuery plug-ins built by the developer community. At the end of jQuery in Action you also have a short introduction to JavaScript.
If your only experience with JavaScript and AJAX is with ASP.NET AJAX, you really owe it to yourself to try a 3rd party JavaScript Library, like jQuery. It will really open your eyes to the power of JavaScript without having to write as much JavaScript. jQuery in Action shows you how easy it is to perform DOM manipulation, use Events, perform AJAX requests, etc. with the very simple and terse jQuery API. The jQuery API looks intimidating given its brevity and command chaining abilities, but I guaranatee that once you finish the first couple of chapters of jQuery in Action everything will make sense and seem intuitve. Because jQuery uses CSS pattern maching rules, called Selectors, to navigate the DOM Tree, you will inevitably also get an appreciation and better understanding for CSS Selectors if you don't fully understand their power already.
There are several real-world examples in jQuery in Action that will help you get started using jQuery right away in your web applications for solving common problems. However, I highly recommend the book for learning the fundamentals of jQuery and then serving as a good reference book as you leverage the power of jQuery more and more in your daily development. jQuery in Action would have saved me a lot of time and effort when I was first learning jQuery for my development projects as well as for a number of samples I created for presentations at the South Florida CodeCamp and Sarasota .NET Developer Group on the ASP.NET MVC Framework and AJAX using jQuery.
Learn more about jQuery in Action.