jQuery Mobile First Look: Book review and Giveaway

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Packt Publishing There is no doubt that mobile currently is hot. The team behind the favourite JavaScript framework of many (jQuery) answered the need of a touch-optimized web framework, and decided to create jQuery Mobile. The development focuses on creating a framework compatible with a wide variety of smartphones and tablets. Although the framework was released almost one year ago, not many people know about it. Luckily, Giulio Bai wrote a book about the first steps into jQuery Mobile.

Thanks to Packt Publishing, I was able to read the book and wrote a review about it that you can read below. At the start, I was already really looking forward to it, since I never played around with the framework before. Now, you have a chance to win this book (almost 200 pages) and read it yourself!

What you'll learn from this book:

Why jQuery Mobile is a better choice compared to other frameworks
Create and style pages and dialogs
Use toolbars, theme en enhance them
and much more!

Read the review below and make sure to check out how you can win a hardcopy version of this book. Also, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter to get updates on more future giveaways.

Table of Contents

Preface
Chapter 1: What is jQuery Mobile?
1. How jQuery Mobile was born
2. jQuery mobile and other libraries
  1. jQTouch
    1. Who is it for?
    2. How does it look?
    3. What should I remember?
  2. Sencha Touch
    1. Who is it for?
    2. How does it look?
    3. What should I remember?
  3. iUI
    1. Who is it for?
    2. How does it look?
    3. What should I remember?
  4. iWebKit
    1. Who is it for?
    2. How does it look?
    3. What should I remember?
  5. Comparison
    1. Type of package comparison
    2. Why choose jQuery Mobile?
3. How to get jQuery mobile
4. jQuery Mobile in action
5. Getting involved
Chapter 2: Organizing Content: Pages and Dialogs
1. Understanding page structure
2. How multi-page templates work
3. How to link internal and external pages
4. Navigation and page transitioning in AJAX
5. Dialogs: creation, deletion, and behavior
6. Theming pages and dialogs
Chapter 3: Configuring and Extending jQuery Mobile
1. Customizing default settings
2. Handling events
  1. Touch events
  2. Scroll events
  3. Page-related events
3. Working with methods and utilities
4. Using the theme framework
Chapter 4: Reading, Writing, Communicating: Content
1. How content is displayed
  1. Default HTML markup styling
2. Using columns and grids
  1. How to create a simple grid with buttons
  2. Creating grids with more than two columns
3. A note on collapsible blocks
  1. Nested collapsible blocks
  2. Collapsible sets
4. Theming content
Chapter 5: Navigation Made Easier: Toolbars
1. How do toolbars actually work?
2. Different types of bars
  1. Header bars
    1. Creating a header
    2. Customizing buttons
  2. Footer bars
    1. Creating a footer
    2. Adding buttons and other elements
  3. Navbars
    1. Creating a navbar
    2. Customizing navbars
3. On positioning
  1. Fixed positioning
  2. Fullscreen positioning
  3. Persistent footer
4. Theming toolbars
Chapter 6: Mobile Clicking: Buttons
1. What do buttons look and feel like in jQuery mobile?
2. Buttons markup and icons
  1. Creating link buttons
  2. Creating form buttons
  3. Adding icons
3. Displaying buttons
  1. Inline buttons
  2. Grouped buttons
4. Theming buttons
Chapter 7: Transmitting Information: Forms
1. Form basics
  1. Form structure and initialization
2. Input elements
  1. Text inputs
    1. Text fields
    2. Password fields
    3. Text areas
  2. Search inputs
3. Flip switches, radio buttons, and checkboxes
  1. Flip toggle switches
  2. Radio buttons
  3. Checkboxes
4. Sliders and select menus
  1. Sliders
  2. Select menus
5. Theming forms
Chapter 8: Organizing Information: List Views
1. Basics and conventions for list views
  1. Nested lists
  2. Numbered lists
  3. Read-only lists
  4. Split button lists
2. Spicing up your lists
  1. Count bubbles
  2. List dividers
  3. Images
  4. Formatting content
  5. Implementing a search filter bar

The book also includes two appendices: API Calls and Properties and Resources and Troubleshooting.

Pictures

Inside the book

Outside the book

Review

Discover the endless possibilities offered by jQuery Mobile for rapid mobile web development. With a tagline like that, you get met excited already. The funny thing is that I didn't knew much about this framework and heard about jQTouch first. Luckily, a great thing of this book is that the first chapter already does a dive/comparison with jQTouch and other mobile web development frameworks, and explains why jQuery Mobile is the best choice. And I must say, I'm impressed with the conclusion and I'm convinced jQuery Mobile is the way to go (especially when you read the other contents of the book). I was missing the great integration with PhoneGap though, but that's something totally different.

The next chapter dives directly in creating your first "Hello Mobile World" application, which is very simple. Personally, I'm a big fan of comments in the code, but sadly this book is missing out on that. What I'm also kind of missing, is the use of new HTML5 elements instead of div-tags. On the other hand, this is a book about jQuery Mobile and not HTML5. A really great plus from this book, is the use of images. Providing the user with visual information is great, and can make things more clear. The author used a lot of them, to show the reader what he meant.

Chapter three, but especially four take a deep dive into some visual aspects of the framework. These can be pretty hard to go through if you're not familiar with jQuery/HTML etc. in the first place, and need to understand the basics a little bit more. Yet, I'm impressed by the easy kind of explaining things to the reader by the author, and showing it step by step to make stuff clear. For me, it meant I could skip some parts, but I can understand this is needed to reach out to the whole community.

The Navigation Made Easier: Toolbars chapters is one of the most interesting chapters from the book (at least for me). Instead of creating crazy CSS or calculations with JavaScript, the book thought me that jQuery Mobile can do this tendious work for you. It also shows there are a couple of different kind of toolbars, each with hir own function and meaning. Theming, which is discussed throughout the whole book, applies to toolbars as well.

Buttons and Forms can with hand and hand with eachother, which probably is the reason the author decided to place these chapters after eachother. These chapters simply dive into the power of the framework, and explains what can be done with good examples. Here, the examples do make use of some HTML5 stuff (like input type="search") to make the whole look and feel even more complete.

The last chapter is pretty straightforward as well: Displaying List views. It shows what kind of list you can use best in several situations, which can easily be changed by jQuery Mobile. Once again, the author does this with great examples to show the reader what can be done. The appendices have been extremely useful for me as well. It shows a list of properties and methods (much like an API) and some small notes on them. When I wanted to experient some more with the framework, that's the place I needed to be.

Overall a great book to read when it's raining outside. When you combine the reading with some examples of your own, you'll be able to create your own mobile platform with the use of jQuery Mobile in no-time. And, when you already have some jQuery knowledge, you'll go through the book much faster.

Giveaway

Now that you know all this information about jQuery Mobile First Look, I'm pretty sure you would love to add this book to your collection. Packt Publishing has kindly decided to provide one hardcopy version of this book to one lucky Marcofolio.net Reader!

During, this contest, we'll work with tokens. The more tokens you have, the greater the chance is of winning the actual book. But how to get a token?

Simply leave a comment

Dropping some kind words in the comment field, will provide you with one token.

Tweet about this giveaway on Twitter

One token will be provided to you if you tweet about this giveaway on Twitter.

Tweet about this giveaway on Twitter and leave a comment linking to your Twitter update!

The combination of both will give you not 2, but three tokens.

Example: If you leave a comment like this. I tweeted about this contest here http://twitter.com/marcofolio/status/118198835452461056 , it'll provide you three tokens which increases the chance of winning the book. It's that simple!

Don't forget to enter a valid e-mail address, otherwise I won't be able to contact you if you've won the prize. When the contest has finished, all valid entries will be entered on Random.org. The first one that will pop-up on top of the list will be announced as winner.

So participate now and who knows you could be the lucky winner!

Rules / Notes

Pack Publishing is only able to send this book to the UK, or countries in the US and Europe. If you live outside these countries, you'll receive the eBook version.
This contests ends on October 3rd.

Good luck to everyone! Oh, and on a little side note: The Open Source Awards from Packtpub are currently running as well! Check out the OSA home page for more information.

Update: Contest has finished

Small note to tell everybody that the contest has finished. I want to congratulate Eliazer Braun for winning the book!