I've been working with jQuery on & off for the last four years and this book made me realize there is so much more to my favorite JavaScript library. The book lives up to the title as it covers the practical aspects of jQuery in a straight-forward manner in just 100 pages with 100 code samples. This is a gem of a book - the best technical book I've read this year (I read about one a month) and one of the best books I've read on jQuery (jQuery in Action and Learning jQuery are the others I read earlier)
It meets all the expectations I have of a good technical book - author is an expert on the topic, it's written in plain-English with no fluff and it provides a number of take-aways that you can apply at work. I had several 'aha' moments while reading through the facts like these -
The nth-child() filter doesn't have a zero index
The default context used by the jQuery function when selecting DOM elements is the document element (e.g. $('a', document)). This means that if you do not provide the jQuery function (e.g. jQuery()) with a second parameter to be used as the context for the DOM query, the default context used is the document element, more commonly known as <body>.
One might incorrectly assume that the text() method only returns the text node of the first element in a wrapper set. However, it will actually join the text nodes of all elements contained in a wrapper set and then return the concatenated value as a single string.
Many of the samples are well-commented & display DOM manipulation wizardry. I'm sure I'll run into ocassions where I can put the tricks mentioned in this book to good use.
It would be nitpicking to say there are a few typos here & there. This book is a great resource for intermediate & advanced jQuery developers.
