How many times have you bought products online, from outlets such as Amazon? I bet the answer is a fair few times over the years—after all, you can't go into a bookstore late at night, peruse the books, and make a choice, without worrying about the store's closing time or knowing whether you will find a particular book.

Building forms for online sites is arguably one of the key areas where you are likely to use jQuery; the key to its success is ensuring that it validates correctly, as a part of offering a successful user experience.

Throughout this chapter, we're going to go back to the basics a little and delve into some of the techniques that we can use to validate forms, using a mix of HTML and jQuery validation tricks. You'll also see that creating successful forms does not require a lot of complex code, but that the process is equally about ensuring that we have considered the form's functionality requirements at the same time.

Over the next few pages, we...