I was recently sent a copy of JQuery Mobile by Packt publishing for review. I've dabbled in the JQuery Mobile development language a fair amount, so I was interested to see what this book could teach me that may be different from the information out there in the community.

I was quite interested to see how the author would approach a subject as broad as JQuery Mobile as it is a fairly diverse subject. The book starts off by setting the scene of what JQuery Mobile is and how it works. It also discusses browser and device compatibility issues using a series of tables to show how the technology will perform.

The information about how JQuery Mobile works is quite extensive. Over the last few weeks I've used the book as a reference source during projects and each time it has had enough information within it to solve my query. I won't list the entire contents here but it has sufficient depth in each aspect of development to get a novice up and running quickly.

Each chapter approaches its subject in such a way as to build a common scenario that you might encounter during a mobile project. In this way you can easily see how the technology can be applied to a useful business purpose, rather than just isolated technical examples.

Summary

The Packt JQuery Mobile book is a good book. It is easily usable and would provide a good introduction to JQuery Mobile to any novice or intermediate developers. It has two minor shortcomings in that it does not have a large amount of depth to some of the technology examples. You may find half the information you need, but not quite all of it. The other minor issue is that all of the information contained within it is essentially available online already. With JQuery being such a popular development language there are huge amounts of community resources that provide much the same information, just at the end of a Google search.

As an aside...

One of the credited reviewers is Ray Camden. For me this lends the book an extra level of credence as I've seen Ray present on this subject a few times and it is obvious he knows the subject well. Hopefully with him being a reviewer Packt have taken the time to take onboard any of his feedback and amend the publication accordingly.

As a final aside I've come to really appreciate PDF versions of technical books, as it allows me to search through them far more easily, and they are incredibly tablet friendly.