My Review

I don't usually buy technical books; I'm more of a hands-on learner and the books that I've purchased in the past just collect dust. It's one of the reasons why I'm so impressed with jQuery Enlightenment. Besides being an eBook (and therefore can't collect dust), Cody has structured the book in a way that makes it perfect to have as a learning tool as well as a reference.

You can read the book top-down or skim through the topics, find something you're interested in, and get a detailed and easy to understand write-up on the subject. Cody takes the learning processes one step further by providing code examples, linked to JS BIN, that can be viewed and run in your browser. For someone like me, the concrete examples and ability to play with the concepts, helps reinforce the topics covered.

Whether you are a new jQuery users, or a seasoned jQuery developer, jQuery Enlightenment won't disappoint!

jQuery 1.4

The current version of jQuery Enlightenment was written for jQuery 1.3.2. I spoke to Cody about the recent release of jQuery 1.4 and his plans for an update. He is working on a new version of the book that he estimates will have twice the content (or more) and is tentatively priced at $30. Lastly, he plans to offer a limited-time discount on the update for existing jQuery Enlightenment owners. [Note from Cody: All of this information is subject to change]

Giveaway

As mentioned previously, I have 3 coupons available for free copies of jQuery Enlightenment. If you would like a chance to win, leave a comment below and on Wednesday (1/20) at 2pm PST, I will randomly select 3 people.

Winners!

The random number generator has spoken and the following people have won a coupon for a free copy of jQuery Enlightenment:

• Jim
• Sam De La Garza
• Bjorn van der Neut

I'll be sending the coupons codes out shortly. Congratulations, I know you'll enjoy the book.

Suppressing the temptation to try out all of the new features, I jumped right in and started surfing the web. I'm actually using Chrome to type up this post and so far, everything seems to be working fine.

So far the only issue I've noticed is the rendering/handling of the LEGEND HTML tag inside the FIELDSET HTML tag. Here is a screenshot of the difference between Firefox (left) and Chrome (right):

Note: The same rendering issue happens in Safari, so I need to determine if it is being caused by Webkit or an error in my code ;)

I was really interested to see if Chrome included any developer tools, similar to Firebug. There is a JavaScript Console which gives you similar information to what you'd get in the Firebug Console, Net and HTML tabs. There is also a JavaScript debugger, but at this point, it looks like it is just a command line tool, so IMO, Firefox with Firebug has a clear advantage in JavaScript debugging.

One new feature I really like is the Task Manager. It's just like the Task Manager in Windows, except for it only displays Chrome related information. It breaks it down the Memory, CPU and Network utilization for the Browser, Tabs, and Plug-ins:

John Resig, Mozilla employee and jQuery creator, recently posted his thoughts on the Task Manager...it certainly seems like a very useful tool.

For an initial release, Google Chrome seems to have a lot of promise. It will be interesting to see how this affects the current browser landscape.

If you've tried Chrome, I'd be interested to hear your first impressions...

Despite my best-efforts to follow Gmails TOS, I believe that my account has been disabled...hopefully only temporarily. And here's why:

I made a couple updates to emAlbum Pro last night and wanted to send out an announcement (since the updates resolved some login issues). As I mentioned previously, all of my email accounts are managed through Gmail. So, knowing that most sites/servers have restrictions on bulk emailing, I headed over to the Gmail Help Center for guidance.

According to their Gmail Sending Limits page:
"Google will temporarily disable your account if you send a message to more than 500 recipients or if you send a large number of undeliverable messages".

Based on the above, I interpreted that to mean one (1) message cannot contain more than 500 recipients (it does say "a message" after all). So, I proceeded to break the ~900 recipients I had into 5 groups, just to be on the safe side.

When I tried to send the fifth message, I received the "An error occurred trying to send the message". I ended up on the Gmail Help Discussion and discovered that the limit is actually a daily limit, not a message limit (as insinuated in the Help Center).

So, now I am stuck, unable to send emails...which come to think of it...isn't so bad :D

That's 18,091 Spam emails (and counting) that I didn't have to scan/review/delete...

Nice!