Recent Reading:
jQuery Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach
By B. M. Harwani, published by Apress
Cookbook/Recipe style books seem to be all the rage at the moment. Although I prefer reference books, I do find the cookbook style useful for things that I don't do very often, and this book was no exception. I would emphasize, though, that it's not a book you could really use to learn how to use the library.
jQuery is one of the most widely used JavaScript libraries and the book provides solutions to a wide range of the problems you are likely to encounter. The books starts out with the basics - selecting and using the DOM, and moves on to more complex situations from there. I found the form validation examples, and the event handling material particularly useful.
Each entry consists of a statement of the problem, followed by a solution, and then a longer or shorter explanation and discussion of how and why the solution works. The stuff I used out of the book worked just fine, with no errors. Obviously, I didn't use everything, but the quality of the code provided seemed fine to me.
I was, however, a bit disappointed by the quality of the book production. The paper it's printed on is rather low quality, and some of the fonts used in displaying sample output are reproduced in very small type, making it difficult to read. Overall the level of graphic design leaves something to be desired. Fortunately, the content manages to overcome this handicap.
I found it useful, but I suspect this is partly a matter of taste. Ten years ago I would have recommended dropping into your nearest computer bookshop and browsing through this book and the O'Reilly equivalent to see which one is more to your taste. Sadly the dominance of Amazon has ended the possibility of this sort of activity, as well as the possibility of serendipity in the finding of books you never knew existed.
C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 by Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield. Prentice Hall
Qt is a C++ cross platform library. It started out as a GUI library, but it has long outgrown that, and it's starting to look more and more like a comprehensive cross platform framework. It's also gaining new features very fast, which is something of a problem for any author.
None the less, this book will provide application programmers with a solid foundation when they come to use Qt. When I did a comparative review of Qt books last year, I didn't have access to this book. However, I recently used a colleague's copy at work, and found it so much more useful, and comprehensive, than my other Qt books, including the earlier edition of this book, that I bought my own copy out of my first paycheck! What better recommendation could you want?
This book is a must for those who need to use the entire framework, since it covers far more than just the GUI, including multithreading, networking (note, though, that it doesn't cover using the QNetAccessManager, which arrived after the book went to print), 3D graphics, using databases, and extending Qt programs with Javascript.
The one real weakness of the book, probably caused by the rapid development of the framework, is that the GUI material basically assumes that the reader wants to program the GUI facilities directly instead of using Designers and/or Creator. I've noticed that there is a little bit of snobbishness in the Qt community, with the old guard maintaining that the only way to work in Qt is via direct programming. Hopefully the next edition of the book will teach GUI programming via the Creator IDE, and the Designer. Lets just see if we can break the 'real programmers program in noughts and ones' attitude in parts of the community :)
So would I recommend this book? Wholeheartedly. My current job has taken me into realms of the Qt framework I've never used before, and this book enabled me to get up speed very fast under a schedule that was very, very, tight.
Highly recommended.
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