This past year I had the pleasure of being asked by Jim Minatel at Wrox to write a Wrox Blox covering the basics of jQuery for ASP.Net Developers. Having co-authored 2 previous books, I realized that writing a book, regardless of the size, is a lot of work, but something that I also find gratifying once you have a finished product. Over the last 2 years, I had gotten more and more into jQuery and really loved its simplicity and power, and thought that this would be a great opportunity to share some of the knowledge I had gathered.
For those that are not familiar with the term, a Wrox Blox is a short e-book (30+ pages) which covers a narrow topic. They are not intended to be an exhaustive discussion of a topic, but rather to cover one particular aspect of what is often a much broader subject matter. Because of their narrower focus and the fact that they are only available as e-books, Wrox is able to keep the cost of the Wrox Blox very low. Wrox Blox generally include a lot of code examples rather than being a purely theoretical discussion of a topic.
After a couple of months, several missed deadlines and a page count that greatly exceeded what was originally requested, I finally finished the Wrox Blox which was subsequently published last September. I am very pleased with the final product which comes in at 66 pages and is a great introduction to jQuery and ASP.Net. jQuery for ASP.Net Developers includes sections on the jQuery API and its usage, and on using jQuery with ASP.Net WebForms and ASP.Net MVC frameworks. I had a great time writing the book and like all writing assignments of this size, it really forced me to dig into jQuery much deeper than I had previously. It also gave me a greater appreciation for why Microsoft chose to ship jQuery with Visual Studio 2010.
As part of this assignment, I decided to create a companion website to show off the samples from the book. Since jQuery had a big role to play in the MVC framework and I needed greater exposure to ASP.Net MVC in order to be able to write on the topic, I decided to write the sample website using ASP.Net MVC. Rob Conery is probably having a heart attack as he reads this since we have had many discussions on the merits, or lack thereof, of MVC vs. WebForms. I like both frameworks and can see different business cases being made for using each framework. Ultimately, I think it is important for developers to have a broad base of knowledge on how different frameworks handle common programming challenges, so using MVC for this website made complete sense for me. You can view the companion website at jquery.theaccidentalgeek.com. Over time, I’ll be adding to the website with additional jQuery examples and functionality.
If you have any interest in learning jQuery and seeing how easy it is to incorporate into your ASP.Net websites, then I would highly recommend jQuery for ASP.Net Developers. At only $6.99 it is very inexpensive way to get up to speed on jQuery.