13 Dec

jQuery 1.3 With PHP; buy it!

Christmas is coming, as most of us (especially parents and people that have wallets) know, so it’s time for ye all to dig deep and buy the perfect gift for that favourite web developer in your life.

Not knowing what that perfect gift could possibly be, I’ll recommend instead that you invest in a copy of my book, JQuery 1.3 with PHP.

Reviews are just starting to come in. I only know of two on-line ones so far, my favourite of which is this one:

The author does a great job of introducing complicated theories and breaking them down into manageable steps, whilst always taking very thorough considerations for applying jQuery knowledge into CMS ’s and web applications.

I noticed that the same reviewer posted this on Twitter: thoroughly impressed with reading jQuery 1.3 with PHP. writing a review on it, will be available soon!

The other one that I’m aware of is more of a list of notes than a review. The only thing he says in general about the book is “Overall a good book.”

There are a few minor criticisms in the second review that I don’t agree with – that I didn’t use inline functions in all cases, didn’t use Google’s functions to load jQuery from its CDN, and used document.getElementById in some cases instead of using jQuery’s $ function.

My reaction to those points are: inline functions are explained later in the book as I didn’t want to throw the reader head-first into understanding them, there’s no point in loading three libraries (google, jquery and jquery-ui) when you only need jquery and jquery-ui, and for the purposes of getting an element by its ID, document.getElementByID is much quicker than $.

I think the real problem with my decisions with the above points is that, after having had them pointed out as mistakes, I feel I should really have explained more clearly in the book why I chose to do things in those ways in the first place. Well, that’s something for edition 2 😀

So far, though, the reactions are positive, and I hope this continues – there haven’t been any “this is crap” reviews so far, which is good.

I know of a few other people that are writing reviews, and can’t wait to see them. So reviewers, please do criticise it – it makes the end-product better.

And christmas shoppers, it’s a great book 😉

16 thoughts on “jQuery 1.3 With PHP; buy it!

  1. Another review, by Ryan Pharis.

    As good as the official docs are, there is always room for improvement
    by using more robust and clearer examples. That’s exactly what you get
    with “jQuery 1.3 with PHP”

  2. Another one. More critical than the others, but still good. Thanks Roy.

    There is nothing in this book which you can’t find on the web. But the real thing is that it puts together most of the things you will need and creates a great cookbook for back-end developers who want to do some “web 2.0 stuff” without knowing a lot of Javascript and cross browser compatibility.

  3. Phil Freo reviewed it here. His only gripe was that the book was in black and white. Unfortunately, I had no say over that!

    Overall, if you’re a programmer not super familiar with PHP or JavaScript, this book does have some very helpful explanations with good examples.

  4. Another review, courtesy of Marco Folio. There is also a competition giving the book away.

    I really think this is a great book that you should have if you’re a PHP developer that wants to use some very good use of jQuery on his website. A “must-have” on every bookshelf, one of the better jQuery books I’ve seen so far.

  5. Thanks, Phil Sherry, for this review!

    Lots of people have wondered how to do “that edit–in–place thing that Flickr does with text inputs”, and here it is. Also, despite using jQuery for over two years, I managed to learn a few functions I’d never even heard of before. Bonus.

  6. Very cool. I’m very new to PHP and only know enough javascript that I can usually modify someone else’s code to make it do what I need it to do.

    I’m working on a project for my library and I was very pleased to find out how easy it it was to implement the datatables. I’ve used the code from Chapter 9 with some minor modifications – I’m connecting to my mysql database and I added an extra column to the table – and everything appears to be working correctly except that the columns are not sorting correctly. The first 4 columns only sort A to Z (but not Z to A) and the fifth column does not sort at all. You can see the page I’m working on here http://tamuresources.awardspace.us/pagination/tables.html

    2)I would like to add a “View Detail” link at the end of each row that would connect to another page http://tamuresources.awardspace.us/displayrequest.php?sirid=$sirid . Is there an easy way to accomplish this?

    Thanks for your help.

  7. Looks like I forgot to add a question:

    1)Do you have any idea what would cause this weird sorting problem?

  8. @Eric – in your example page, load up firebug and see what’s going on. when you click to sort using the fifth column, that’s stated in the request – iSortCol_0 is 4 (the 5th column), and sSort_Dir is desc or asc. You need to use this in your server-side logic to do the sorting.

    as for the second question – if you want to add a view detail link, I’m not sure why you can’t just add it in a sixth column?

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