Book Review: 51 Tips, Tricks, and Recipes with jQuery & ASP.NET Controls

I recently finished reading the 51 Tips, Tricks, and Recipes with jQuery & ASP.NET Controls eBook by Suprotim Agarwal. The eBook is $14.99 and it comes with a 14 day 100% money back guarantee. It can be ordered from the DotNetCurry website.

This eBook reminded me a lot of Cody Lindley’s jQuery Enlightenment in that it split it’s eBook into small bit size installments (known as recipes) that can be consumed either sequentially or on a individual basis. The recipes are organized into situations or problems that you might want to solve using jQuery. This eBook differs from jQuery Enlightenment in that it focuses on the interaction with ASP.NET WebForms, which has a unique rendering of its server controls.

Most of my web development history has been doing ASP.NET WebForms (and more recently ASP.NET MVC) so, I enjoyed reading this eBook. I could understand the situations, problems, and pain points that the eBook addressed. It was nice to see how jQuery can resolve these issues in an unobtrusive and cross-browser way while only requiring a small amount of code.

Each recipe is formatted in the same way…

• A challenge that explains the situation, problem, or pain point being addressed
• The solution displayed in the form of HTML and jQuery
• An explanation of the code broken up in paragraphs, code snippets, and screen shots
• A link to a live demonstration
• A list of supported browsers for the above recipe
• Useful links that are appropriate to further explain features from the code.

I would have written some of the code differently and I did find some performance concerns, but nothing major and when push comes to push and shove many micro-optimizations become moot in the big picture. Selector optimization and looping performance can help make your code become more efficient, but it is really DOM manipulation that will kill your performance in the end.

Updated: I have updated this post with a link to my detailed findings, suggestions, and opinions. You can find my comments here.

Despite these minor issues, I do recommend this eBook for any ASP.NET WebForms developer hoping to learn how jQuery could be integrated into their environment.