I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading Master Mobile Web Apps with jQuery Mobile by Matt Doyle for Elated. Admittedly, this has been my first in-depth experience with jQuery Mobile and I’m beyond inspired to start work on a mobile Web application in one form or another just as soon as humanly possible.
jQuery Mobile is an optimized JavaScript framework that sits on top of jQuery and enhances the environment in the mobile context. It builds upon the foundation provided by jQuery by providing a set of encompassing functions that make creating a mobile Web app nearly trivial.
With Master Mobile Web Apps with jQuery Mobile being my first experience with jQuery Mobile, I need to take a minute to explain how truly impressed I am with the work done so far by the jQuery Mobile team. From start to finish I was increasingly impressed with the breadth and depth of planning that must have gone into the features of jQuery Mobile. With just a few additions to your HTML5, you can have a fully functioning mobile optimized version of your app in a very short amount of time.
Master Mobile Web Apps with jQuery Mobile is an ambitious project, with jQuery Mobile being at Beta 3 at the time of this writing, and at Beta 2 at the time of it’s publishing. The great thing here is that the book is an eBook, so updates will be made available as circumstances change over time. The book covers the major conventions of jQuery Mobile, and I would consider the information to be extremely reliable and unlikely to change in any sort of debilitating degree between now and jQuery Mobile Final.
Book content
This book is a great technical resource, reference piece, and walkthrough of jQuery Mobile. Code samples and documentation are littered throughout, and the author goes into just enough context when it comes to extraneous details about implementation.
The book is broken up into three main sections followed by an elaborate set of appendices. Part I is a couple of chapters on the introduction and explanation of jQuery Mobile and some very basic usage of the framework. Part II gets into a lot more detail through seven chapters of jQuery Mobile Essentials. In these chapters a number of big picture ideas are explained including the concept of ‘pages’ in jQuery Mobile, button creation and usage, toolbars, dialogs, forms, list views, and content formatting. The third part of the book focuses on theming in jQuery Mobile, it’s API, and covers the complete Web app example “Task Tango”, a well rounded mobile task manager.
I couldn’t have asked for the book to be organized in a better way. I can usually guess what’s going to be covered next throughout a book, but in this case I was so surprised by the coverage of jQuery Mobile itself I was consistently thinking about the impressiveness of the framework itself. I recall consistently thinking ‘whoa, they even included that?’ as I read through a number of sections in the book.
In true jQuery fashion, jQuery Mobile has thought of so many things when it comes to customization. A ton of really smart defaults have been set, but customization has been left completely open, and you can override pretty much every aspect of the standard implementation. I can only hope we begin to see more and more Web applications follow the conventions set by jQuery Mobile though, there is a lot of really great stuff within.
Overall reaction
I’m thrilled to have had the opportunity to read Master Mobile Web Apps with jQuery Mobile by Matt Doyle for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it’s a really elaborate manual for jQuery Mobile. I’ll be using it repeatedly as a reference in tandem with the jQuery Mobile Docs.
The book is full of code examples, including a fully documented to-do application built on PHP, MySQL and jQuery Mobile. That alone provides an extremely valuable first-hand look at the implementation and usage of jQuery Mobile in a targeted fashion. I try to learn by example as much as possible, so capping off the end of the book with a fully functional Web app was a genius move in my opinion.
I highly recommend Master Mobile Web Apps with jQuery Mobile by Matt Doyle if you’re looking for an in-depth look at the ins and outs of jQuery Mobile, even if you’ve worked with it before.
Giveaway details
Matt Doyle has been super generous in providing two copies of Master Mobile Web Apps with jQuery Mobile to raffle off here on Monday By Noon. Since it’s an eBook, there are no geographical limitations in place, so anyone can enter! The rules for entry are pretty simple: retweet the announcement for the giveaway and link to it in a comment below explaining your experience with jQuery Mobile so far and what you’d like to do with it after reading the book should you win.
You’re limited to one retweet/comment combination and entries will be closed October 3rd, 2011 at 11:59am ET. Good luck!
Comments
I built two “live”-sites (next to some demo’s and tests) to see the app-like experience that jQuery Mobile can bring to a web-app. I was surprised it’s “that” easy to build. Of course, if you want heavier customization, you need to dig deeper. Since I’m a great fan of web-apps (native apps are sometimes better, but more often they’re not imho), I’d like to enter the raffle.
btw, my site tomhermans.com (built on WordPress of course) redirects to a jQuery mobile theme that I put together, pretty basic and straightforward, built on one Sunday afternoon I believe..
http://twitter.com/tomhermans/status/118284178050654208
I’m a brasilian developer of 21 years who loves to make mobile applications, i’ve made some apps for iOS and Android but, in the begining of this year, decided to make some cool mobile applications with jQuery Mobile.
https://twitter.com/#!/renatoLuna/status/118283600658567169
I dug into jQuery mobile for the first time last week with a view to using it on our church mobile site.
Like you say, makes developing for mobile quite rapid. Given I only gave it an afternoon, I decided it wasn’t for our project with default themes.
The navbars didn’t look the way I wanted either, truncating larger menu names.
Like I say, that was an afternoon. I’m sure there’s more to be gleaned by spending more time with it.
I remember taking a a look at jQuery Mobile some months back when I was working on a project where I needed to build a prototype UI for a mobile-enabled CMS. I couldn’t wrap my head around it completely, but I did keep some of the lessons in my back pocket to try and use. I think that is book, whether I win it here or purchase it (hopefully, purchased as an HTML5-wiki-like, constantly updated ebook), would be great for me. At least, as soon as I can figure out how to take twitter’s means of retweeting and actually grab theURL on my mobile properly.
https://twitter.com/arjwright/status/118318476896124928
http://twitter.com/#!/lukeholder/status/118361397867458560
Would love to win!
I Absolutely love jQuery Mobile. I bundle it with Phone Gap and deploy apps to iOS faster than zeldman to web standards.
Must admit, I haven’t done much with jQuery and mobile, hence me entering, I feel that the book will assist me in exploring this avenue.
Here’s to winning!
http://twitter.com/#!/ChristopherM/status/118383791877263360
I was just considering JQuery mobile to create a new app last night This would be a big help. Good luck all.
http://twitter.com/srpsco/statuses/118444324999540736
Im new in the “mobile developerment area” so this can be a perfect way to start :). https://twitter.com/#!/knasig/status/118699743181414400
Would love to win such nice and handy eBook!
I absolutely love jQuery Mobile concept and jQuery at whole. But have a little experience in programming mobile web apps. Hope this book by awesome Matt Doyle will help me master such subject.
https://twitter.com/#!/nickplekhanov/status/119022518345531392
http://twitter.com/#!/codeforest/status/119023931746291713
I am writing tutorials on jQuery Mobile.
Thanks
Noob in the arena.. this would be a God send. 🙂
http://twitter.com/#!/pogowolf/status/119023931746291713
My experience with jQuery Mobile has actually been of slight disappointment, as it’s limited due to it’s freshness. I’m constantly following development however!
https://twitter.com/jbrooksuk/status/119044218747494400
I bought this book on summer and studied it.. very cool and simple…
https://twitter.com/#!/peterborto
I have a ton of traditional web apps that I would LOVE to get mobile using jQuery Mobile. I’m a diehard addict to jQuery/jQueryUI, so this is a perfect fit for me!
https://twitter.com/#!/twinsploitation/status/119046254876573696
I’m just starting a project with jQuery mobile and while it is super easy to get started, I’m looking forward to reading up on the optimization you can do to keep things like transitions smooth.
https://twitter.com/#!/anteej
I’ve done all my mobile development with jQTouch up to this point. Can’t wait to get started with jQuery Mobile!
http://twitter.com/#!/WPALLC/status/119060709484142593
I was considering Sencha Touch, but JQuery Mobile has won me over due to its beyond Webkit browsers support.
http://twitter.com/#!/jchristopher/status/118282754034122752
Great! I just finished my first app PhoneGap+jQueryMobile 🙂
Here you find retweet 🙂
http://twitter.com/#!/mnowakowski
I really have not used jQuery Mobile just yet. I am interested in learning so that I may create some slick sites and apps.
http://twitter.com/#!/tfdiehl/status/119602156956422144
I had the chance to build something with the alfa builds. It wasn’t that easy to find documentation/help on special cases. Hope this book can help out.
The RT: http://twitter.com/#!/DavidDeSloovere
You win!
Congrats, you win!
YES!! Thanks for the great read. I’ll be digging into it as quickly as I can.