jQuery is the “write less, do more” JavaScript library. Its powerful features and ease of use have made it the most popular client-side JavaScript framework for the Web. This book is jQuery’s trusty companion: the definitive “read less, learn more” guide to the library. jQuery Pocket Reference explains everything you need to know about jQuery, completely and comprehensively.

I decided to review the JQuery pocket reference. As the title already shows this should be treated as a reference rather than a book you should read from start to finish. I read the first couple of chapters and it learned me a lot about the way JQuery works. I think it is a very powerful way to interact with webpages and it should come in handy while doing APEX development.Especially the way you can respond to user actions, making your page more interactive and thus more attractive to the user.
I think the rest of the book should be treated the way I think it is supposed to be treated: as a reference rather than a book to read from A through Z. Knowledge from this should come in handy while developing APEX applications, especially when implementing Dynamic Actions.
Part of the book consists of an extensive description of every available function, at least, the ones available at the time of writing. Also all the available selectors and selector functions are described.
There is a full chapter on creating plugins. It is probably good to know how to create a plugin in JQuery to increase your knowledge about how this can be used when building an APEX plugin around it.
I think when creating specials in APEX, like dynamic actions or plugins, it is good to know at least a bit of how stuff works and JQuery becomes of ever increasing importance when building web interfaces. Whether you build your applications completely by hand, using plain HTML and JavaScript, use PHP or APEX or whatever interface you are using, almost every one of them uses or can use JQuery.
This books helps in understanding the language and design a bit better. Of course you can use the internet to find all the information you need, but if you are a bit like me, then you tend to get lost in all the information you find out there and often it is really hard to understand what is being written and what it is meant to do.