Over the past month I have been reading jQuery Enlightenment by Cody Lindley. Let me say now, that if you use jQuery or are thinking about using jQuery then you should most certainly buy this book. It’s a quick read (122 pages) that includes colorized code samples, easy to follow examples and solid explanations.

Author Cody Lindley is a member of the jQuery team and explains why he wrote the book.

jQuery Enlightenment was written to express, in short-order, the concepts essential to intermediate and advanced jQuery development. Its purpose is to instill in you, the reader, practices that jQuery developers take as common knowledge. Each chapter contains concepts essential to becoming a seasoned jQuery developer.

This book is intended for three types of readers. The first is someone who has read introductory books on jQuery and is looking for the next logical step. The second type of reader is a JavaScript developer, already versed in another library, now trying to quickly learn jQuery. The third reader is myself, the author. I crafted this book to be used as my own personal reference point for jQuery concepts. This is exactly the type of book I wish every JavaScript library had available.

I would argue that this book is perfectly suitable for beginners too. It’s simply a must have jQuery book. It’s the only one you need; it will take you from beginner to competent user.

I do ASP.NET / C# web development where I build web-based software for school districts. My preferred architecture is one in which I use NO server-controls. That means no GridViews, no Repeaters, no ListViews. If fact, nothing that uses runat server will be found on the page. The page will only consist of XHTML. So there is no need for a viewstate either. We end up using jQuery a lot in this architecture. We use jQuery / Ajax to call Web services that then query the database using LINQ to SQL and pass our data back to the client where we can then populate our XHTML controls. It works great and is extremely fast and efficient. The code couldn’t be cleaner. In addition, this methodology would allow you to easily change to a PHP or Java backend and you wouldn’t have to change a single thing on the frontend. I will give a full example on this methodology another time, but the point is – you need to learn jQuery.

For more information on the jQuery Enlightenment book, including a breakdown of each chapter go here. I would recommend buying the full color book from lulu.com as it’s well designed and very handy to have on your desk.