The Latest...

A while ago (2011 I think), I picked up a Sitepoint book on JQuery.  I love Sitepoint books - they're almost always good - and this one promised to be pretty helpful.  The problem is, I still haven't finished it.

One thing about books for me, especially tech books, is that I need to have an active project I'm working on in order to get the most out of it.  When I ready Simply SQL (which you should read, now, if you need to learn anything at all about SQL), I had a project at work that I was involved with that allowed me to go right to my IDE and apply what I had learned on the spot.

But JQuery is different.  We don't really use much JavaScript at work, mostly because it's not 508 compliant.  I've started using it more lately, as a supplement to coding that is 508 compliant, because I think it improves the useability for most people.  This site uses a bit of JQuery, but that doesn't meen I couldn't make better use of it - if only I'd finish that damn book!

I have a pretty cool project coming up at work this summer that'll give me more opportunities to use JQuery.  I've also begun using it in our CMS, because since I know exactly who will be using it, 508 isn't much of an issue.

So everytime I find myself needing JQuery for something, I end up Googling my exact problem to find my solution.  This doesn't always work out well, as I end up finding code that doesn't always work.  I've also found that JQuery can be very finicky about how it's written.  A piece of code in my photo gallery that scrolls the thumbnail menu in the sidebar took me an entire weekend to get working.  If I bothered to read That Damn Book I'd have probably got it working in under an hour.

So my JQuery book will henceforth be known as, That Damn Book, at least until I finally finish reading it, and hopefully that'll be sometime before 2014.