Chapter 1, Getting Started, gets your feet wet with the jQuery JavaScript library. The chapter begins with a description of jQuery and what it can do for you. It then walks you through downloading and setting up the library as well as writing your first script.

Chapter 2, Selecting Elements, teaches you how to use jQuery's selector expressions and DOM-traversal methods to find elements on the page, wherever they may be. You'll use jQuery to apply styling to a diverse set of page elements, sometimes in a way that pure CSS cannot.

Chapter 3, Handling Events, walks you through jQuery's event-handling mechanism to fire off behaviors when browser events occur. You'll see how jQuery makes it easy to attach events to elements unobtrusively, even before the page finishes loading. Also, you'll get an overview of deeper topics, such as event bubbling, delegation, and namespacing.

Chapter 4, Styling and Animating, introduces you to jQuery's animation techniques and how to hide, show, and move page elements with effects that are both useful and pleasing to the eye.

Chapter 5, Manipulating the DOM, teaches you how to change your page on command. This chapter will also teach you how to alter the very structure of an HTML document as well as adding to its content on the fly.

Chapter 6, Sending Data with Ajax, walks you through many ways in which jQuery makes it easy to access server-side functionality without resorting to clunky page refreshes. With the basic components of the library well in hand, you will be ready to explore how the library can expand to fit your needs.

Chapter 7, Using Plugins, shows you how to find, install, and use plugins, including the powerful jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile plugin libraries.

Chapter 8, Developing Plugins, teaches you how to take advantage of jQuery's impressive extension capabilities to develop your own plugins from the ground up. You'll create your own utility functions, add jQuery object methods, and discover the jQuery UI widget factory. Next, you'll take a second tour through jQuery's building blocks, learning more advanced techniques.

Chapter 9, Advanced Selectors and Traversing, refines your knowledge of selectors and traversals, gaining the ability to optimize selectors for performance, manipulating the DOM element stack, and writing plugins that expand selecting and traversing capabilities.

Chapter 10, Advanced Events, dives further into techniques such as delegation and throttling that can greatly improve event-handling performance. You'll also create custom and special events that add even more capabilities to the jQuery library.

Chapter 11, Advanced Effects, shows you how to fine-tune the visual effects of jQuery that can be provided by crafting custom-easing functions and reacting to each step of an animation. You'll gain the ability to manipulate animations as they occur and schedule actions with custom queuing.

Chapter 12, Advanced DOM Manipulation, provides you with more practice modifying the DOM with techniques such as attaching arbitrary data to elements. You'll also learn how to extend the way jQuery processes CSS properties on elements.

Chapter 13, Advanced Ajax, helps you achieve a greater understanding of Ajax transactions, including the jQuery deferred object system for handling data that may become available at a later time.

Appendix A, Testing JavaScript with QUnit, teaches you about the QUnit library, which is used for the unit testing JavaScript programs. This library will be a great addition to your toolkit for developing and maintaining highly sophisticated web applications.

Appendix B, Quick Reference, provides a glimpse of the entire jQuery library, including every one of its methods and selector expressions. Its easy-to-scan format is perfect for those moments when you know what you want to do, but you're just unsure about the right method name or selector.

In order to run the example code demonstrated in this book, you need a modern web browser, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, or Microsoft Edge.

To experiment with the examples and to work on the chapter-ending exercises, you will also need the following:

Additionally, to run some of the Ajax examples in Chapter 6, Sending Data with Ajax and beyond, you will need Node.js.

This book is ideal for client-side JavaScript developers. You do not need to have any previous experience with jQuery, although basic JavaScript programming knowledge is necessary.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "When we instruct jQuery to find all elements with the class collapsible and hide them, there is no need to loop through each returned element."

A block of code is set as follows:

body { 
  background-color: #fff; 
  color: #000; 
  font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; 
}
h1, h2, h3 { 
  margin-bottom: .2em; 
}
.poem { 
  margin: 0 2em; 
} 
.highlight { 
  background-color: #ccc; 
  border: 1px solid #888; 
  font-style: italic; 
  margin: 0.5em 0; 
  padding: 0.5em; 
} 

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The Sources tab allows us to view the contents of all loaded scripts on the page."

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