Book Image

jQuery 1.3 with PHP

Book Image

jQuery 1.3 with PHP

Overview of this book

To make PHP applications that respond quickly, avoid unnecessary page reloads, and provide great user interfaces, often requires complex JavaScript techniques and even then, if you get that far, they might not even work across different browsers! With jQuery, you can use one of the most popular JavaScript libraries, forget about cross-browser issues, and simplify the creation of very powerful and responsive interfaces ñ all with the minimum of code. This is the first book in the market that will ease the server-side PHP coder into the client-side world of the popular jQuery JavaScript library. This book will show you how to use jQuery to enhance your PHP applications, with many examples using jQuery's user interface library jQuery UI, and other examples using popular jQuery plugins. It will help you to add exciting user interface features to liven up your PHP applications without having to become a master of client-side JavaScript. This book will teach you how to use jQuery to create some really stunning effects, but without you needing to have in-depth knowledge of how jQuery works. It provides you with everything you need to build practical user interfaces for everything from graphics manipulation to drag-and-drop to data searching, and much more. The book also provides practical demonstrations of PHP and jQuery and explains those examples, rather than starting from how JavaScript works and how it is different from PHP. By the end of this book, you should be able to take any PHP application you have written, and transform it into a responsive, user-friendly interface, with capabilities you would not have dreamed of being able to achieve, all in just a few lines of JavaScript.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
jQuery 1.3 with PHP
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

How to work with the examples


In every chapter of this book, I will provide a few code examples. If you wish to try them out, you will need to replicate the test environment I'm using here.

On my test server, my directory layout (within the public_html directory) is like this:

./php_and_jquery
./php_and_jquery/jquery.min.js
./php_and_jquery/jquery-ui.css
./php_and_jquery/jquery-ui.min.js
./php_and_jquery/1-tests 
./php_and_jquery/2-contextual_help 
[... others from various chapters ...]
./php_and_jquery/ckeditor 
./php_and_jquery/images 
./php_and_jquery/jquery-validate 
[... other plugins ...]

You can see that there's a common theme—everything has its own subdirectory. The jQuery library is kept in the root directory, ./php_and_jquery/, along with the jQuery UI library (when we use it). We will discuss where to get these from in Chapter 2, Quick Tricks.

Here is the root directory of my own test server. It shows the libraries we will use throughout the book, and two test directories (9-5 and 9-4):

When creating your own test server, it should end up looking like this.

You can start out with the empty directories. Each chapter will explain what new files to download and where to get them from.

Each of the examples has a number of screenshots, so you can verify your own tests against what my tests display.