JQuery_ Novice to Ninja - Earle Castledine [2]
What’s in This Book
By the end of this book, you’ll be able to take your static HTML and CSS web pages and bring them to life with a bit of jQuery magic. You’ll learn how to select elements on the page, move them around, remove them entirely, add new ones with Ajax, animate them … in short, you’ll be able to bend HTML and CSS to your will! We also cover the powerful functionality of the jQuery UI library.
This book comprises the following nine chapters. Read them in order from beginning to end to gain a complete understanding of the subject, or skip around if you only need a refresher on a particular topic.
Chapter 1: Falling in Love with jQuery
Before we dive into learning all the ins and outs of jQuery, we’ll have a quick look at why you’d want to use it in the first place: why it’s better than writing your own JavaScript, and why it’s better than the other JavaScript libraries out there. We’ll brush up on some CSS concepts that are key to understanding jQuery, and briefly touch on the basic syntax required to call jQuery into action.
Chapter 2: Selecting, Decorating, and Enhancing
Ostensibly, jQuery’s most significant advantage over plain JavaScript is the ease with which it lets you select elements on the page to play with. We’ll start off this chapter by teaching you how to use jQuery’s selectors to zero in on your target elements, and then we’ll look at how you can use jQuery to alter those elements’ CSS properties.
Chapter 3: Animating, Scrolling, and Resizing
jQuery excels at animation: whether you’d like to gently slide open a menu, or send a dialog whizzing across the screen, jQuery can help you out. In this chapter, we’ll explore jQuery’s wide range of animation helpers, and put them into practice by enhancing a few simple user interface components. We’ll also have a quick look at some animation-like helpers for scrolling the page and making elements resizable.
Chapter 4: Images, Slideshows, and Cross-fading
With the basics well and truly under our belts, we’ll turn to building some of the most common jQuery widgets out there: image galleries and slideshows. We’ll learn how to build lightbox displays, scrolling thumbnail galleries, cross-fading galleries, and even take a stab at an iPhoto-style flip-book.
Chapter 5: Menus, Tabs, Tooltips, and Panels
Now that we’re comfortable with building cool UI widgets with jQuery, we’ll dive into some slightly more sophisticated controls: drop-down and accordion-style menus, tabbed interfaces, tooltips, and various types of content panels. We’re really on a roll now: our sites are looking less and less like the brochure-style pages of the nineties, and more and more like the Rich Internet Applications of the twenty-first century!
Chapter 6: Construction, Ajax, and Interactivity
This is the one you’ve all been waiting for: Ajax! In order to make truly desktop-style applications on the Web, you need to be able to pass data back and forth to and from the server, without any of those pesky refreshes clearing your interface from the screen—and that’s what Ajax is all about. jQuery includes a raft of convenient methods for handling Ajax requests in a simple, cross-browser manner, letting you leave work with a smile on your face. But before we get too carried away—our code is growing more complex, so we’d better take a look at some best practices for organizing it. All this and more, in Chapter 6.
Chapter 7: Forms, Controls, and Dialogs
The bane of every designer, forms are nonetheless a pivotal cornerstone of any web application. In this chapter, we’ll learn what jQuery has to offer us in terms of simplifying our form-related scripting. We’ll learn how to validate forms on the fly, offer assistance to our users, and manipulate checkboxes, radio buttons, and select lists with ease. Then we’ll have a look at some less conventional ways of allowing a site’s users to interact with it: a variety of advanced controls like date pickers, sliders, and drag and drop. We’ll round it off with a look at modal dialogs