EliteIntegrity
Posted June 28, 2010
Chapter 8, for me was brilliant. If the book had only had chapter 8 in it I would have still been pleased. Drag and drop. How to make parts of your website behave like a Windows desktop. Sorting the order of items and dragging them from place to place and have the website remember the result. Without any reloading of the page. This information was perfect for me. And it is not as technical as you might first have thought.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.I have to admit that when I picked this book up I was hoping to learn a thing or two about php. However, after a careful read of the book's description any disappoint I felt was my own fault, as the author isvery clear about the book's intentions. It's clear the author intended this book for readers who have already mastered php and are seeking additional knowledge about JavaScript/jQuery.
So, if you are a php developer who has never bothered to look over the fence at client-side coding practices, this book is ideally for you. If you are a JavaScript developer looking to learn a thing or two about PHP you might be frustrated as the author assumes you are already "good" at php development. Because of this assumption made by the author, very little insight into the php code is given. But, to the author's credit, he warns us about this fact upfront.
Regardless of your knowledge of php or JavaScript/jQuery, this book does an excellent job at presenting many of the patterns and concepts centered around using AJAX and UI patterns to eliminate complete page reloads. I enjoyed the coded examples in spirit more than I enjoyed reading the code. While the JavaScript code gets the job done, I found the use of the custom DOM ready event to be unnecessary, as well as the organization of functions in the global window scope to be a bit dangerous. On the positive side, I did get the impression that the author understood jQuery completely and utilized the library efficiently and effectively.
In my opinion, this is a great book for a very specific type of reader. And that reader would be a php developer who is disconnected to what's been going on with JavaScript and client-side coding paradigms common in today's web development world.
