Last year, I did a few reviews of books by Packt Publishing. This year, they got their own back – Packt have asked me to write a book for them called jQuery 1.3 with PHP.

The book is aimed at experienced PHP programmers who are interested in adding a bit of client-side magic to their sites. jQuery is used because it’s damned powerful, and you can get some very cool results without too much work.

The server-side code will only be described, and examples will be provided for illustrative purposes – the real target of this book is the client-side and how it interacts with the server.

The chapter list has been agreed, although there may be scope for adjustments as the book progresses. Here’s what we have:

1. jQuery and PHP
2. Quick Tricks
3. Tabs and Accordions
4. Form validation
5. Image and file management
6. Data-tables
7. AJAX-based form submission
8. Drag/Drop
9. Optimisation

The chapters are a little more exciting than you may think. For example, Drag/Drop will cover cool tricks like cropping/resizing images, and Data-Tables will include inline editing of the content of the tables.

The time-table suggests that the book may be completed by late August – not sure when it will be out, but I’m guessing October or so.

As a project for the book, I’ll be writing an open-source newsletter system, which will demonstrate all of the code described in the book.