Book Image

Learning jQuery, Third Edition

Book Image

Learning jQuery, Third Edition

Overview of this book

To build interesting, interactive sites, developers are turning to JavaScript libraries such as jQuery to automate common tasks and simplify complicated ones. Because many web developers have more experience with HTML and CSS than with JavaScript, the library's design lends itself to a quick start for designers with little programming experience. Experienced programmers will also be aided by its conceptual consistency.Learning jQuery Third Edition is revised and updated for version 1.6 of jQuery. You will learn the basics of jQuery for adding interactions and animations to your pages. Even if previous attempts at writing JavaScript have left you baffled, this book will guide you past the pitfalls associated with AJAX, events, effects, and advanced JavaScript language features.Starting with an introduction to jQuery, you will first be shown how to write a functioning jQuery program in just three lines of code. Learn how to add impact to your actions through a set of simple visual effects and to create, copy, reassemble, and embellish content using jQuery's DOM modification methods. The book will step you through many detailed, real-world examples, and even equip you to extend the jQuery library itself with your own plug-ins.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Learning jQuery Third Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Simple events


There are many other times, apart from the loading of the page, at which we might want to perform a task. Just as JavaScript allows us to intercept the page load event with <body onload=""> or window.onload, it provides similar hooks for user-initiated events such as mouse clicks (onclick), form fields being modified (onchange), and windows changing size (onresize). When assigned directly to elements in the DOM, these hooks have similar drawbacks to the ones we outlined for onload. Therefore, jQuery offers an improved way of handling these events as well.

A simple style switcher

To illustrate some event handling techniques, suppose we wish to have a single page rendered in several different styles based on user input. We will allow the user to click buttons to toggle between a normal view, a view in which the text is constrained to a narrow column, and a view with large print for the content area.

Tip

Progressive enhancement

In a real-world example, a good web citizen will...