Preface to the First Edition

One of your authors is a grizzled veteran whose involvement in programming dates back to when FORTRAN was the bomb, and the other is an enthusiastic domain expert, savvy beyond his years, who’s barely ever known a world without an Internet. How did two people with such disparate backgrounds come together to work on a joint project?

The answer is, obviously, jQuery.

The paths by which we came together over our affection for this most useful of client-side tools are as different as night and day.

I (Bear) first heard of jQuery while I was working on Ajax in Practice. Near the end of the creation cycle of a book is a whirlwind phase known as the copyedit when the chapters are reviewed for grammatical correctness and clarity (among other things) by the copyeditor and for technical correctness by the technical editor. At least for me, this is the most frenetic and stressful time in the writing of a book, and the last thing I want to hear is “you really should add a completely new section.”

One of the chapters I contributed to Ajax in Practice surveys a number of Ajax-enabling client-side libraries, one of which I was already quite familiar with (Prototype) and others (the Dojo Toolkit and DWR) on which I had to come up to speed pretty quickly.