Just finished reading a review copy of Instant jQuery Selectors by Packt Publishing and written by Aurelio de Rosa, a guy whose name I’ve seen around in a lot of web development articles recently. One of the things that initially turned me on to using jQuery was its CSS-like selectors. That made it very easy to quickly start programming more interactivity into my sites when I was coming from more of an HTML/CSS background and less of a JavaScript background.

But jQuery selectors are not exactly like CSS selectors, despite the healthy amount of overlap. While I knew the parts that were like CSS this book helped me grasp better the parts that are different, such as all the filter methods that are available and traversing DOM subtrees. It also helps to find out the things related to selectors that have been updated and changed as jQuery improves itself. And I found out some of the ways I’ve been writing selectors aren’t exactly bad but could be improved to enhance performance. So this was definitely worthwhile. Now I have to make sure I utilize these principles in my next web project.