Learning jQuery, 4th Edition

Better interaction, design, and web development with simple JavaScript techniques

Overview

• An introduction to jQuery that requires minimal programming experience
• Detailed solutions to specific client-side problems
• Revised and updated version of this popular jQuery book

In Detail

To build interesting, interactive sites, developers are turning to JavaScript libraries such as jQuery to automate common tasks and simplify complicated ones. Because many web developers have more experience with HTML and CSS than with JavaScript, the library’s design lends itself to a quick start for designers with little programming experience. Experienced programmers will also be aided by its conceptual consistency.

LearningjQuery – Fourth Edition is revised and updated version of jQuery. You will learn the basics of jQuery for adding interactions and animations to your pages. Even if previous attempts at writing JavaScript have left you baffled, this book will guide you past the pitfalls associated with AJAX, events, effects, and advanced JavaScript language features.

Starting with an introduction to jQuery, you will first be shown how to write a functioning jQuery program in just three lines of code. Learn how to add impact to your actions through a set of simple visual effects and to create, copy, reassemble, and embellish content using jQuery’s DOM modification methods. The book will take you through many detailed, real-world examples, and even equip you to extend the jQuery library itself with your own plug-ins.

What you will learn from this book

• Create interactive elements for your web designs
• Learn how to create the best user interface for your web applications
• Use selectors in a variety of ways to get anything you want from a page
• Make things happen on your webpages with events
• Add flair to your actions with a variety of animation effects
• Discover the new features available in jQuery in this third update of this popular jQuery book

Approach

We will step through each of the core concepts of the jQuery library, building an overall picture of its capabilities. Once you have thoroughly covered the basics, the book returns to each concept to cover more advanced examples and techniques.

Who this book is written for

This book is for web designers who want to create interactive elements for their designs, and for developers who want to create the best user interface for their web applications. Basic JavaScript programming and knowledge of HTML and CSS is required. No knowledge of jQuery is assumed, nor is experience with any other JavaScript libraries.

Jonathan Chaffer

Jonathan Chaffer is a member of Rapid Development Group, a web development firm located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His work there includes overseeing and implementing projects in a wide variety of technologies, with an emphasis in PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript. He also leads on-site training seminars on the jQuery framework for web developers.

In the open source community, he has been very active in the Drupal CMS project, which has adopted jQuery as its JavaScript framework of choice. He is the creator of the Content Construction Kit, a popular module for managing structured content on Drupal sites. He is also responsible for major overhauls of Drupal’s menu system and developer API reference.

He lives in Grand Rapids with his wife, Jennifer.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Getting Started
Chapter 2: Selecting Elements
Chapter 3: Handling Events
Chapter 4: Styling and Animating
Chapter 5: Manipulating the DOM
Chapter 6: Sending Data with Ajax
Chapter 7: Using Plugins
Chapter 8: Developing Plugins
Chapter 9: Advanced Selectors and Traversing
Chapter 10: Advanced Events
Chapter 11: Advanced Effects
Chapter 12: Advanced DOM Manipulation
Chapter 13: Advanced Ajax

Appendix A: JavaScript Closures
Appendix B: Testing JavaScript with QUnit
Appendix C: Quick Reference