Book Review – jQuery UI 1.6

February 25, 2009 | Published in: Reviews | Tags: , , , , , , 1

Book: jQuery UI 1.6If you have tried jQuery (which is a brilliant JavaScript framework by the way) there’s no doubt that you’ve heard of jQuery UI which includes all kinds of user interface widgets, user interaction helpers, and animations, to help make interactive web applications.

jQuery UI 1.6: The User Interface Library for jQuery, written by Dan Wellman, is a book that contains an in-depth explanation of jQuery UI, information on how to use it in the real world, and is also quite handy for reference. Perfect for user interface designers and developers who need to learn to utilise jQuery UI quickly.

Book Information

Full Title:
jQuery UI 1.6: The User Interface Library for jQuery
Author(s):
Dan Wellman
Pages:
420
Published:
February 2009
Publisher:
Packt Publishing
ISBN:
978-1-847195-12-8

My Review

jQuery UI 1.6: The User Interface Library for jQuery is aimed at front-end designers and developers (like me!) who want/need to learn how to utilise jQuery UI quickly. It requires some prior knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and also being ‘comfortable’ with jQuery itself. It assumes no prior knowledge of jQuery UI and is fairly comprehensive in getting you up to speed with its core concepts.

The book covers all major interaction widgets contained in JQuery UI, including tabs, accordions, sliders, dialogs and more, and also in depth information on things such as the Theme Roller and visual effects.

One chapter I jumped straight into (because I had never used the widget before) was about the auto-complete widget. The book was really helpful in explaining exactly what it did and its configurable properties (laid out in an easy to read table). It also went though an example showing helpful screenshots along the way showing what the configurable properties actually did.

One of the things that stood out in this book was its promise of real world examples – its all okay seeing some pretty widgets and effects but actually finding real world situations to apply them where they are beneficial to users is the challenge. The book did this pretty well showing examples such as loading a flickr gallery into a tab, a site navigation built upon an accordion, and a colour picker using sliders. The examples were not too fancy and not too complex; definitely suitable for anyone beginning with jQuery UI to understand and implement.

Each chapter does contain a fair bit of code, but thankfully you can download the examples from the web.

Book Contents

  1. Introduction – An introduction/overview of jQuery UI including how to get it, the theme roller, browser support, and licensing.
  2. Tabs – How to use tabs, including using AJAX in tabs
  3. The Accordion Widget – In depth instructions on using the accordion widget and a navigation side-bar example.
  4. The Dialog – Using and controlling UI Dialogs
  5. Slider – Implementing sliders, as well as a useful colour picker example.
  6. Date Picker - In depth instructions on the date picker and a nice example that uses Ajax to check for dates that cannot be chosen.
  7. Auto-Complete – Detailed guide to using and implementing auto-complete to enhance forms.
  8. Drag and drop – How to use draggables and droppables with examples.
  9. Resizing – Guide to the making elements resizable.
  10. Selecting – Using selectables, plus a big example on multiple selecting images in a gallery (and showing in tabs)
  11. Sorting – Implementing sortable elements. Contains a good example on sorting web page content boxes (which is retained after page reload).
  12. UI Effects - Guide to effects and animations you can use.

Sample Chapter

You can grab a sample chapter (chapter 3: the accordion widget) here. This should let you see if the book is right for you.

Conclusion

Overall this book is excellent for beginners and contains some pretty useful examples along with some good in-depth explanations.

My only gripes would be that I can see some of the content of this book being outdated fairly quickly (since jQuery UI is always in development), and also that the index was not *fantastic* – example being I could not find ‘effects’ or ‘easing’ in the index (it was under ‘UI effects’; minor issue but bothersome occasionally).

In conclusion, if you use jQuery and want to start learning the whole of jQuery UI quickly and efficiently (or want a handy offline reference) you should consider picking up this book for sure.

Verdict: 7.5/10 – Great for the jQuery UI beginner to learn from.

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