In the first six chapters, we explored the jQuery library in a series of tutorials that focused on each jQuery component and used examples as a way to see those components in action. In Chapters 7 through 9 we invert the process; we’ll begin with the examples and see how we can use jQuery methods to achieve them.

Here we will use an online bookstore as our model website, but the techniques we cook up can be applied to a wide variety of other sites as well, from weblogs to portfolios, from market-facing business sites to corporate intranets. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on two common elements of most sites—tables and forms—while Chapter 9 examines a couple of ways to visually enhance sets of information using animated shufflers and rotators.

In this chapter, we will use jQuery to apply techniques for increasing the readability, usability, and visual appeal of tables, though we are not dealing with...