Reviews for Beginning JavaScript and CSS Development with JQuery (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

1. A poorly written book

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2009

   The author's style is very clumsy, he keeps repeating the same thing again and again, sometimes as often as thrice in six lines of text. Here is an example from page 72:
   
   "With the W3C's event model, you can assign as many of the same events to the same element that you like." [another sentence goes here] "In contrast to the traditional event model, the W3C event model lets you assign as many events of the same type to the same element as you like. In the following JavaScript, I can theoretically assign as many focus and blur events to the element as I like..."
   
   In a number of cases, a figure is referenced in the text but does not exist in the book - try to find Figure 3-2 on the same page 72.
   
   The same code is repeated again and again with just one small detail changed in it (although even that change isn't necessary for the example). In chapter 2, the same CSS is repeated in each example, each time taking about half a page, and the only difference is that the color of the highlight is changed for some reason from time to time. HTML code is repeated needlessly again and again, with the only difference of the name of the JavaScript file included in it. Without these repetitions, the book would be much thinner.
   
   There are also some smaller details that I find annoying, like the author's habit to prepend many style names and element IDs with 'tmp', like 'tmpSearch'. For me, 'tmp' means temporary and when it is used for just anything in the example code, I find this misleading.
   
   In the overall, this book is a torture to read.