Developing Mobile Websites with HTML5

David Karlins’s book should have titled Developing Mobile Websites with jQuery. The book is essentially about making a mobile website using jQuery and jQuery Mobile. I am still not convinced that developing a mobile site with jQuery is better than a responsive site. Right out of the box, you have to include a jQuery mobile CSS, a jQuery library and a jQuery Mobile library. If you want your own design, you have to add another custom CSS. On the other hand, if you design a responsive site from scratch, you can just have one CSS with only the styles you need and one JavaScript file with only the functions you need.

As far as a book on learning jQuery Mobile, this one is a bit too long. jQuery Mobile isn’t that hard to learn and Kris Hadlock’s jQuery Mobile: Develop and Design is much more concise in getting the job done. It’s a bit older, but the concepts still applied.