Packt Publishing donated a couple of books to the Tampa ASP.NET MVC Developer Group. One of them is Learning jQuery 1.3 , which I have been reading the past few days.
Learning jQuery 1.3 is an excellent book. One of the authors is on the jQuery Development Team, which explains why they were able to get a jQuery 1.3 book out a month after it was released.
Truth be told I am not up on the specifics introduced into jQuery v1.3 other than what I read from the jQuery Development Team's post, but if you are looking for a good book on jQuery that assumes no knoweldge of jQuery, Learn jQuery 1.3 is a good one.
If I had more time in the day, I would love to be an expert at Javascript and jQuery. But honestly, I don't have the time, so I measure a jQuery book's worth by how easily it explains the topic and how many useful examples it has on jQuery to solve common problems. Learning jQuery 1.3 excels at both in my opinion.
Most of the time I am interested in understanding:
- Selectors
- Events
- Effects
- Mainpulating the DOM
- AJAX
- Table Manipulation
- Improving Forms
Literally the first 8 chapters are focused on these things, with each chapter dedicated to a particular subject. Learning jQuery 1.3 could have stopped there, but it went on to discuss Shufflers and Rotators, using PlugIns, and developing PlugIns.
Now that the ASP.NET MVC Framework ships with jQuery and I suspect we will see more of jQuery in ASP.NET 4.0, you need a good book on jQuery. If you don't have one yet, Learning jQuery 1.3 is worth buying.