September's Book Recommendations for the JavaScript Ninja or PHP Guru

Thanks to Amazon Associates, this month I have a new widget to display my book recommendations in..and boy have I got some good books for you guys to check out.

The first (and a title I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time) is John Resig’s Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja. For anyone unfamiliar with the author, Resig is the author of that great framework many of us use everyday – jQuery. In this, his second book, he goes into much detail about advanced uses of JavaScript, Best practices when it comes to unit testing and a whole lot more that you won’t find anywhere else. Although the book hasn’t been officially released yet, you can buy an early eBook/Paperback set from Manning Publications right now (as I did) – you won’t regret it!.

Here are the others..

The next book I have to recommend is PHP Web 2.0 Mashups – I refer to this book as every Web API fans wet dream because it goes through examples of how to use many of the APIs available from popular sites like Flickr in a lot of depth. Having coded myself using many of the included services even I was surprised to learn just how much was possible by simply connecting up different APIs using a few simple lines of code. Want an example of what I’m talking about? Why not check out HousingMaps.com – a PHP Mashup between Craigslist and Google Maps that lets you find houses for sale or rent across a map in any given area.

Learning jQuery 1.3 is a good recommendation because the book is fresh off the presses, great for beginners and discusses most of latest improvements available in the framework. One of the notable improvements mentioned is the speed of CSS Style selectors – instead of using the top-down approach previously implemented, the newest version of jQuery uses a bottom-up approach called "Sizzle" – which allows jQuery to be much faster. Another improvement is the addition of .live() effects which allow you to add event listeners to any of the currently existing elements in your page as well as any future elements. What does this mean? Well, it means that parts of a page which you’ve updated via Ajax can also be interactively enriched without calling additional functions to re-parse the whole page. Pretty nifty, right?.

My Final 3 recommendations for this month are: Wicked-Cool PHP (A great book for people who want to skip all the "Hello world" examples given in PHP guides for beginners and instead teaches you about GD, email notifications, Web Services and tracking your users with cookies), JavaScript – The Good Parts (A book aimed at developers with an intermediate level of experience that want to know the best way to create and use Objects, Types and Arrays effectively) and finally Designing Web Interfaces – This is a first-rate book which is filled with excellent examples from popular sites such as from Yahoo, Google, Netflix, Apple and even Xbox. Unlike most HCI books which focus on desktop applications, this book is specifically about the web and delivers on exactly what you’re after. It’s examples demonstrate just how much the web user’s interfaces have changed in the last few years and anyone designing user interfaces will find the book very useful.

That’s it for this month’s recommendations. Let me know if you found them useful or have any recommendations of your own!