Chapter 1, Introduction and Overview, introduces you to what jQuery is, why you would want to use it, and why is it useful to combine it with PHP. Also, it gives a list of projects illustrating uses for combining PHP and jQuery.

Chapter 2, Quick Tricks, looks at a few quick examples on how to interface PHP and jQuery and a few tricks, which demonstrate how to relieve the most obvious resource wastes on the server.

Chapter 3, Tabs and Accordions, walks through the creation of tabs and accordions using the jQuery UI project, managing tabs and accordions using a rich text editor and a bit of PHP, and using Ajax to populate your accordion and tab panels.

Chapter 4, Forms and Form Validation, explores form validation using jQuery and PHP and how to use the same PHP configuration to validate on both sides—the server and the client side. It also covers examples on optimization of large select boxes and building auto-suggest fields.

Chapter 5, File Management, teaches you to manage almost everything—creating, uploading, editing, moving, downloading, and deleting files and directories.

Chapter 6, Calendars, builds a weekly calendar for you, which has events that can be created, edited, moved around, and deleted. It also takes care of recurring events.

Chapter 7, Image Manipulation, discusses methods for manipulating images with jQuery and PHP, along with some ways to make the changes non-destructive, so that multiple manipulations, such as select, rotate, resize, and crop, can be made on the same image.

Chapter 8, Drag and Drop, demonstrates a few uses of drag and drop, including sorting lists, dragging between lists, and hierarchical sorting, which can be used to improve the usability of your content management system.

Chapter 9, Data Tables, builds a very large data table and discusses how to navigate, sort, search, paginate, and search it using jQuery and Ajax.

Chapter 10, Optimization, shows the ways to optimize jQuery and various other elements of the web development environment.

To try out the examples in this book, all you need is a test server; we recommend using PHP 5.2 or up. You will also need to download the jQuery library from http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery.

This book is for PHP application developers who want to improve their user interfaces through jQuery's capabilities and responsiveness. Whether you are familiar with jQuery or have only dabbled a little with JavaScript, this book will provide you with numerous practical examples on how to improve your application.

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

Code words in text are shown as follows: "The URL string we're working with includes a number of sSearch parameters."

A block of code is set as follows:

<?php 
  $dir='.'; // directory containing the scripts 
  $d=0; 
  foreach (new DirectoryIterator($dir) as $file) { 
    $d+=$file->getMTime(); 
  } 
?> 

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

$.getJSON('./calendar.php?action=get_event&id='+calEvent.id,function(eventdata){ 
  var controls='<a href="javascript:calendar_delete_entry('+eventdata.id+');">'+'[delete]</a>';
    if(+eventdata.recurring)controls+='<br />'+'<a href="javascript:calendar_delete_recurrences('+eventdata.id+')">'+' [stop recurring]</a>';
      $('<div id="calendar_edit_entry_form"

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

yum install php-pecl-imagick

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "When you click on this ? icon, smaller help icons will be shown next to all the elements in the page."

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