For those of you keeping track, my contribution was Chapters 10-14. Cesar Otero basically set up the basics of jQuery, and then I came along and talked about fancy stuff, like code optimization (Chapter 10: Writing Effective jQuery Code, Chapter 11: jQuery Template, and Chapter 13: Advanced Asynchronous Programming with jQuery Deferred,) plugin development (Chapter 12: Writing jQuery Plugins) and unit testing (Chapter 14: Unit Testing with QUnit.)

The project fell into my lap during a period in which I had a lot of time available to write, so it was a serendipitous opportunity that ended up working out perfectly.

When I came on board, the book was half finished and much of the structure was in place, so I was tasked with finishing out the remaining content and putting some polish to the existing chapters through the author review process. It was a lot of fun to do and exposed me to more depth in the jQuery API than I ever would have gotten simply as a consumer of the library.

In interviews now I tell candidates “pretend I’m Google if you have any questions about the jQuery API” when we’re going through code samples and I’m not really kidding.*

The book is broken into two sections, an introduction to jQuery/JavaScript basics and a section on Applied jQuery, which is where the “Professional” part of the title really comes into play. Most of that Applied jQuery section is my work and I’m very pleased with that content. I wrote a lot about jQuery and JavaScript best practices for speed and maintainability, introduced jQuery Templates, talked about the new Deferred object, went in-depth into unit testing with QUnit and did a long chapter on plugin development.

I learned a lot just writing it, so hopefully if you pick the book up you’ll learn a thing or two in reading it.

Speaking of interviews… while I’ve had some good luck hiring and am no longer a team of 1, I am looking for a senior JavaScript engineer to join my team. Why join me? I’m an awesome boss (even my interviews are fun) and the work is almost entirely focused on web application development using the latest/greatest web technologies. What more could you want?