Preface

In 2013 Manning contacted me about writing a book on jQuery UI. Because I had been an enthusiastic user of the library for five years, and had been a member of the jQuery team for approximately two years, I had a lot of experience and knowledge that I wanted to share with the world. I said Yes!

From the start, I made it clear that I wanted to take a different tack with this book: rather than reprinting the library’s API documentation in a book, which is something I think far too many tech books do, I wanted to write about how to use the jQuery UI components in real-world usage scenarios and applications. I also wanted to tackle the tough questions for jQuery UI users. Why should you use the jQuery UI datepicker instead of the native date picker included in HTML5? How do you use jQuery UI on mobile devices, especially in low bandwidth situations?

From start to finish the book took about a year and a half to complete, and although it was an exhausting amount of work, I’m extremely happy with the result. jQuery UI is a stable library that helps you write robust, accessible, and cross-browser friendly web applications today. This book represents my attempt to share the knowledge I’ve gained from building countless projects with jQuery UI, and from working as a member of the jQuery team. I hope you enjoy it.