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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
What’s new in the second edition?
When we decided to go ahead with creating a second edition of jQuery in Action, I
remember someone saying to me, “Should be a piece of cake. After all, you just need
to make some updates to the first edition.”
How wrong they were! It actually took longer to complete this second edition than
to write the book in the first place. You see, we didn’t want to fall into the trap of
“phoning it in” by just adding updates here and there and calling it done. We wanted
this second edition to be much more than a warmed over version of the first edition.
Anyone comparing the table of contents of the first and second editions of this
book will note that the structure of chapters 1 through 8 hasn’t changed all that
much. But that’s pretty much where the similarities stop.
This second edition isn’t just a tepid rehash of the first edition with some extra
information sprinkled here and there. Each and every paragraph in the text, and each
and every line in the example code, has undergone a careful inspection. Not only
have the additions and changes made to jQuery between versions 1.2 and 1.4 been
taken into account, the information in the chapters and the example code have been
updated to reflect current best practices regarding page scripting and the use of
jQuery. After all, as a community, we’ve got two more years of experience writing
highly interactive scripted pages using jQuery under our belts.
Every example has been examined and either updated to better show how to use
jQuery 1.4 in practice, or replaced with an example that is better suited to showcasing
the concepts being discussed. For example, readers of the first edition may remember
the comprehensive Bamboo Grille example at the end of chapter 4 that highlighted
jQuery event handling. Try as we might, we were unable to reshape that example to
flaunt the newest jQuery event handling concepts, such as “live” and custom events.
So it has been completely replaced with the
DVD Ambassador example that serves as a
better vehicle for demonstrating the advanced event-handling concepts.
The second part of the book, focusing on jQuery
UI, is completely new material,
covering the extensive changes that jQuery
UI has undergone since the first edition
was published.
We’d estimate that, counting the additions, replacements, and updates of the
material presented throughout the first part of the book, as well as the completely new
content of part 2, that at least 50 percent of this second edition is brand new material.
The other 50 percent has undergone extensive rework to ensure that it is up to date
and reflective of modern best practices.
So much for the “piece of cake”!
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