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October 4, 2009

Jesús del Carpio
jj
Jj's blog
» Learning jQuery 1.3

Cover of Learning jQuery 1.3Right after finishing my review on the Django template development book I got contacted again by the Packt folks to do the same for the Learning jQuery 1.3 book. I was most pleased with the request.

Now, this book has 444 pages compared to the 272 pages from Django book. There is much more to teach about jQuery than about the django template language :) .

The book has 11 chapters and 4 great appendixes. It starts off teaching you how to set up a page to use jQuery, teaches you selector magic and from then on the example scripts get more and more complicated as the chapters pass by.

Once you’ve read the first half of the book (Free sample chapter), you’re good to go. At this point you should know what is it that you can do with jQuery and start using it. But this is the moment where it just starts to get interesting.

Chapters, 7 on Table manipulation, 8 on Forms with function and chapter 9 about Shufflers and rotators show you how to do amazing stuff you (well, I) wouldn’t have thought of. This is the most important part of the book as it shows you how to put all the jQuery functionality together and teaches you several awesome tricks and techniques to make transparency gradients, lightboxes, scrollers, sort, tables, invoices and tons more.

What’s also great about the book is that it enforces graceful degradation and progressive enhancement through all the examples. So all your development is funcional even for people without Javascript. And he does that providing good arguments on why it is a good idea to keep it that way, since I know lots of people that are just not willing to care about people not using Javascript.

I was gladly surprised with Appendix on Closures, it has a good explanation of that concept that takes so long to grasp. the rest of the appendixes are great resource of information with reference to tools, plugins and related reading to increase your Javascript fu.

Overall

This is a great book, that could have easily be divided in two books, Basic jQuery and Mastering jQuery. Goes from the basic to some medium/advanced level. Every web developer (front end and backend) should read this in order to know how to provider great user experience :) .

by Jj at 9:58 PM under book , en , geek , javascript , programación , review , tech , web (Comments)
August 17, 2009

Jesús del Carpio
jj
Jj's blog
» Django 1.0 Template Development

Django template developmentLast month I got an email from Packt telling me about their latest book on Django Template development. I was invited to give it a read and see how I liked it.

Now, I’m a lazy and slow reader. But this book was quite an easy read. I liked how fast I went through the pages and how friendly the writer seemed :) .

This is a book focused on Django templates, not in Django itself, but through out the book it becomes obvious that you’ll always need to have basic knowledge on how views and urls work.

My first impression of the book was a bit of disappointment since it’s a Django 1.0 book, but there hasn’t really been any big changes in Django 1.1 that would affect the book. So the book is still valid ;) .

Highlights

The chapters that I found most useful were “Chapter 5: Loading and inheriting Templates” (I would have liked someone telling me about inheriting best practices when I started), “Chapter 6: Serving Multiple Templates” (great use case of the mobile site :) ) and “Chapter 9:Customizing the Admin Look and Feel” (Found it easier to read than the actual Django documentation on the subject), I was pretty interested on chapter 11 about Internationalization, but it felt a tad too short.

Missing?

I don’t know if I missed this part when reading but I think it would have been good to address the fact that a template is a list of nodes and each of these nodes has to be rendered. It’s mentioned when teaching you how to create your own template tag, but I feel this could have been explained a little bit further to have knowledge on how the templating system works.

Here in Aureal we work with two Web designers, they don’t do any code. They just help us making the HTML look pretty and one of their biggest issues is with forms, we lazy coders like to print the default table format {{my_form}}. German and Justina always have a hard time figuring out what’s behind that form, what attribues are in it, why is it a table, hwo to change that and all that… I was expecting the book to have an extra chapter on that but I never found it :( .

Overall

The book is a great introduction to templates best practices and even after working heavily with Django you might learn a trick or two from it.

by Jj at 11:29 PM under book , django , en , geek , programación , review , tech , web (Comments)