jQuery: Read This First

If you're paid for your programming efforts (or if you put even a marginal value on your time), I would strongly recommend that you buy and read a few jQuery-related books before jumping into the code writing. This approach is usually way more efficient (and gives you a broader picture) than relying on snippets provided by good uncle Google. If, on the other hand, you believe everything should be free, be my guest ... but then your time is probably worth approximately as much :)

The following two books were a perfect fit for my level of JavaScript/CSS experience. The first one is a great step-by-step introduction to jQuery (focusing on jQuery, not on mundane JavaScript or CSS details) and the second one serves me as a great paper reference (I am old enough to prefer paper to pixels).

jQuery.convert++

Readers of articles I wrote for InformIT have probably noticed that I've avoided using high-level JavaScript libraries and relied on thin browser abstraction layers: Sarissa for AJAX and X library for cross-browser DOM/DHTML compatibility.

Recently I've decided to try jQuery and got persuaded within a day. My new projects are using jQuery ... and you'll see a number of reasons in my future blog posts. Repetitive operations that I had to code previously became much simpler and more streamlined with jQuery functions.

Poor man's capitalization in JavaScript

I wanted to have simple capitalization in JavaScript (the first letter of the string should be upper-case, the rest of the string unchanged). Although the String object provides uppercase and lowercase functions, there is no capitalization function. The simplest expression I could come up with is this:

txt.substr(0,1).toUpperCase()+txt.substr(1)

Do you have a better solution?

Testing Your Website in a Realistic Environment (InformIT article)

My last website performance related article published by InformIT, Testing Your Website in a Realistic Environment, deals with an interesting question: "assuming you've fixed most of the performance problems your web site had, how can you test what your global visitors experience without buying a round-the-world ticket?"

Fix Your Web Site Performance Problems (InformIT article)

If you've realized that you might have HTTP-related performance problems when reading my Why is my web site so slow article published by InformIT, you can find a variety of quick fixes and more permanent solutions in my Fix Your Web Site Performance Problems article (also published by InformIT).

Multiple style attributes in IE and FF

I've just stumbled across an interesting discovery today: if you use the style attribute multiple times in a single HTML tag (which you should not do, BTW, but it could happen if you write HTML code by hand), Internet Explorer will merge the style definitions whereas Firefox will ignore the second style attribute.

Why is my web site so slow (InformIT article)

If you've been involved in more than a few website deployments, I'm positive that you've encountered the following scenario: The website was developed, tested, demonstrated to internal audiences, accepted, deployed, …and failed completely due to unacceptable performance. In my InformIT article Why is my web site so slow I'm describing various reasons that can cause unacceptable performance for global visitors of your web.