jQuery Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for jQuery Developers (Animal Guide)

I like this book more than any other jQuery book I've seen, especially Dan Wellman's neverending stream of Packt titles. The recipes are all practical and to-the-point, with very little in the way of useless padding no one needs. Even though it's not a "Learn jQuery" sort of book, if you have a decent grasp of JavaScript, you shouldn't need much more to get going--maybe an up-to-date reference since this only covers 1.3.x I believe. My one gripe is that the example code is a little tricky to read in black-and-white. Every sample hits you with a giant blast of markup with the little tidbit of JavaScript you need to focus on buried somewhere in the middle of it. It's set in bold, but it's still pretty tough to figure out exactly what it is on the page that you're supposed to be caring about without some careful study. I don't know how they could have improved the situation without paying for color plates, though, so I can't complain too much.