Book Image

Learning jQuery - Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

Book Image

Learning jQuery - Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Learning jQuery Fourth Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using a plugin


Using a jQuery plugin is very straightforward. We need to simply obtain the plugin code, reference the plugin from our HTML, and invoke the new capabilities from our own scripts.

We can easily demonstrate these tasks using the jQuery Cycle plugin. This plugin, by Mike Alsup, allows us to quickly transform a static set of page elements into an interactive slideshow. Like many popular plugins, it can handle complex, advanced needs well, but can also hide this complexity when our requirements are more straightforward.

Downloading and referencing the Cycle plugin

We can find the Cycle plugin using the jQuery Plugin Registry, or on the plugin's home page at http://www.malsup.com/jquery/cycle/. This page directs us to the download instructions, which yield an archive containing both the full Cycle plugin and the smaller Cycle Lite. For our purposes here, we'll use the full version in the file called jquery.cycle.all.js.

Once we have the plugin in our site's directory, we can reference...