jQuery in Action

A good web development framework anticipates what you need to do and makes those tasks easier and more efficient; jQuery practically reads your mind. Developers of every stripe-hobbyists and professionals alike-fall in love with jQuery the minute they've reduced 20 lines of clunky JavaScript into three lines of elegant, readable code. This new, concise JavaScript library radically simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages.

jQuery in Action, like jQuery itself, is a concise tool designed to make you a more efficient and effective web developer. In a short 300 pages, this book introduces you to the jQuery programming model and guides you through the major features and techniques you'll need to be productive immediately. The book anchors each new concept in the tasks you'll tackle in day-to-day web development and offers unique lab pages where you immediately put your jQuery knowledge to work.

There are dozens of JavaScript libraries available now, with major companies like Google, Yahoo and AOL open-sourcing their in-house tools. This book shows you how jQuery stacks up against other libraries and helps you navigate interaction with other tools and frameworks.

jQuery in Action offers a rich investigation of the up-and-coming jQuery library for client-side JavaScript. This book covers all major features and capabilities in a manner focused on getting the reader up and running with jQuery from the very first sections. Web Developers reading this book will gain a deep understanding of how to use jQuery to simplify their pages and lives, as well as learn the philosophy behind writing jQuery-enhanced pages.

None of the JavaScript libraries today has a more impressive track record than Google Closure, the tool suite used for Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Maps. Closure: The Definitive Guide has precisely what you need to get started with these tools, including valuable information not available publicly anywhere else.

Written by Michael Bolin — a former Google engineer who made many contributions to Closure — this guide explains the library's design and offers code examples that illustrate best practices. You'll also learn how to minify your JavaScript code with the compiler, and learn why the combination of the library and the compiler is what sets this toolkit apart from other JavaScript libraries.

• Discover several ways to use the compiler as part of your build process
• Learn about Closure type expressions, primitives, and common utilities
• Understand how classes and class-based-inheritance are emulated in Closure
• Get the best performance from Closure by learning about event management
• Learn the life-cycle of a UI component
• Get best practices for using Closure Templates
• Test and debug your JavaScript code

Michael Bolin is a former Google engineer who worked on Google Calendar, Google Tasks, and the Closure Compiler. He is a graduate of MIT, and the creator of TargetAlert, a popular extension for the Firefox web browser.