Reviews for jQuery 1.3 with PHP

1. Thoughts on jQuery 1.3 with PHP

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, April 12th, 2010

   I prefer the blow-by-blow reviewing style, so here are my thoughts on jQuery 1.3 with PHP
   
   Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview
   Nice intro to the book with a few good examples of jQuery usage, but also a great analogy explaining AJAX requests (for anyone who's been living in a cave for the last few years)
   
   Chapter 2: Quick Tricks
   This chapter is where you start getting your hands dirty with some great real-world examples. 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.
   
   Chapter 3: Tabs and Accordions
   Here, you get introduced to jQuery UI, which is a great way to ease the pain for the developer with little-to-no CSS knowledge. With that same developer in mind, the CSS instructions are clear enough without being patronising. The basic jQuery Accordion and Tabs are covered, but with a nice PHP twist to aid end users. You're also introduced to a little AJAX usage, which dynamically loads the data into the Accordion and Tabs.
   
   Chapter 4: Forms and Form Validation
   A solid chapter about forms that covers some nifty tricks with JSON, including: form validation, remote validation, dynamic selects, auto-suggestion.
   
   Chapter 5: File Management
   Some basic security concerns are addressed here, before moving on to build a file manager. There's a lot of code in this chapter, which deals with reading, creating, renaming, deleting, and moving files and directory structures. Flash makes a minor appearance when you deal with file uploads - using the Flash-based Uploadify plugin - and finally file downloads are dealt with using a sneaky jQuery-generated iframe to load file requests and punch them down to the user.
   
   Chapter 6: Calendars
   This chapter tells you how to build a weekly calendar, using the jquery-week-calendar plugin: creating, editing, moving and deleting events, as well as recurring events. You'll also get familiar with some more of the jQuery UI library.
   
   Chapter 7: Image Manipulation
   ImageMagick time! Non-destructive manipulation to cachable images is the name of the game here. Rotation and resizing are fairly straight-forward, but cropping gets interesting with the use of the Jcrop plugin.
   
   Chapter 8: Drag and Drop
   This is a fairly consise chapter, as the jQuery UI library makes drag'n'drop as easy as falling over after drinking a crate of Stella Artois. However, jQuery UI doesn't deal with saving your data, so that's the main coverage in this chapter, ending with a nice way to connect lists.
   
   Chapter 9: Data Tables
   This starts off showing you how to use the DataTables plugin for some nice output on relatively small tables. Nice inclusion of Nine Inch Nails and Primus in the examples! Once you're in the big league and need to do some heavy lifting, you'll learn how to grab data on demand with AJAX. MySQL is also involved in this chapter. Caching and pagination get a walkthrough, along with sorting and filtering.
   
   Chapter 10: Optimization
   This final chapter contains some solid gold tips. It takes you through where to put your scripts, how to aggregate and cache them, how to un-cache the buggers when needed, and how to write your own plugins. Some excellent jQuery optimisations close up the chapter.
   
   Overall thoughts
   jQuery 1.3 with PHP is certainly a worthy purchase for the PHP developer who wants to look into JavaScript but hasn't really had the time. Plenty of the examples lead on to suggest trying more complicated PHP development (eg. using sessions in the examples, where database calls would be used in the wild), but your time isn't constantly wasted with things you've already known since you started life as a PHP developer. There is an extensive use of plugins, showing you don't have to do everything from scratch, which is certainly an area of jQuery that excels over other libraries.
   
   Conclusion
   If you're a PHP developer who doesn't know much JavaScript, buy it.