Book Review: jQuery Mobile

jQuery Mobile

This is one of those books where you can find an easy way to start with a new technology. They have to be easy enough, settling the base for the new playground. At the same time, they should include bread crumbs which bring you to more challenging projects.

jQuery is the one most successful programming frameworks for the web, becoming a facto standard. Its mobile release, jQuery Mobile, is helping thousand of web developers in a seamless migration to mobile programming. HTML5-based and supporting many mobile browsers, jQuery Mobile allows developers to program nice and effective user interfaces.

Concerning the book, the first two chapters, The mobile platform and Starting with the framework are the basic for those developers new to jQuery. In any case, both can be read very fast, and you can find always interesting details even if you have experience programming. Nonetheless you have also a fast track starting at chapter 3, UI Components. Altogether with chapter 4, List, and chapter 5, Form components, they forms the core of the user interface programming with jQuery Mobile. If you are familiar with HTML5 programming, web apps and Javascript, these chapters is all what you need to know about fundamentals of jQuery Mobile. Those interested on event handling and more advanced features should read also chapter 6, The Framework and JavaScript, chapter 7, Creating Themes, and chapter 10, Extending the Framework.

Finally, the book contains also a bunch of interesting chapters completing all what you need to create, deploy and distribute your own webapp. This useful information can be found in chapters 8, Installation and Offline Access, chapter 9, A complete WebApp, and chapter 11, Packaging for Stores.

Therefore, despite its basic approach, I found the book highly recommendable for new programmers or jQuery newbies. As part of my reading, I was playing, programming some code which can be found in my Github account. You can reuse it following Apache 2.0 license.

Disclaimer: I know Maximiliano Firtman since 2011, when I was speaking about BlueVia in the conference Adobe en Vivo Buenos Aires. From then, we are been collaborating in other projects, and his advice and experience about developers communities in LATAM, and deep knowledge about mobile and web technologies, has been always very useful.