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Keywords: JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, CSS, web programming Title: Murach's JavaScript and jQuery, 4th edition Author: Mary Delamater, Zak Ruvalcaba Publisher: Murach ISBN: 978-1492041139 Media: Book Verdict: Very highly recommended.

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Murach's books are big in every sense of the word. Physically this is a hefty volume that weighs in at almost a kilo and a half across 753 pages. It's a big book when it comes to the content too — this is a book that is light on filler, digression and irrelevance. Now into a fourth edition, it's a book that takes the beginning JavaScript programmer all the way from this is how you code a variable to the basics of installing Node.js for server side programming. It's what you'd expect from a book that promises to take you from Beginner to Pro right there on the front cover.

The book is organised into four sections — each of which leads very naturally to the next. There's a clear progression in which lessons learned previously are applied almost immediately to the next section or topic. The authors, Mary Delamater and Zak Ruvalcaba, do a great job in getting to the nitty gritty with clear explanations and very concise code. For those interested in just getting to the point, or else want to use the book as a quick reference, it's a format that works really well.

The first section opens with the basics of JavaScript. Now obviously this also involves HTML and CSS, and the reader is not assumed to know all of that background already. However, the examples are well chosen so the reader is guided through these topics as well as the JavaScript code. A major selling point of Murach books is the use of extended examples in the code, and these mini—applications are a core part of this book too. Many of these applications are revisited several times — for example coded initially with just JavaScript, but later expanded and revised with jQuery or more advanced JavaScript techniques.

Section two of the book introduces jQuery, including the use of effects, animations, forms validation and jQuery plugins and UI widgets. This is followed by section three which looks at the combination of JavaScript and jQuery in more advanced scenarios. Here we are coding exception handlers, using regular expressions and so on. There's coverage of web storage, cookies, arrays, maps, sets and more.

The final section of the book takes us to the most advanced topics in the book. Here we are looking at things like closures and modules. By this point the basics are out of the way and, in contrast to the earlier sections, the explanations could have done with a bit more text. It would have been good to cover a bit more on where these advanced techniques and why — not just on the how. The final two chapters look at Ajax and Node.js — again with some concrete examples and clear instructions and code.

The book does a great job in showing how to combine HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery to produce a series of fully functional mini—applications that get across a set of techniques and methods that can then be applied to your own work. Overall there's no hesitation in recommending this as an ideal starting place for someone wanting to learn JavaScript and jQuery.