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

Chapter 8. Developing Plugins

The available third-party plugins provide a bevy of options for enhancing our coding experience, but sometimes we need to reach a bit farther. When we write code that could be reused by others, or even just ourselves, we may want to package it up as a new plugin. Fortunately, the process of developing a plugin is not much more involved than writing the code that uses it.

In this chapter, we cover how to create many different kinds of plugins, from the simple to the complex. We'll start with plugins that simply make new global functions available, and move on to cover jQuery object methods of various types. We will also cover jQuery UI's widget factory, a powerful way to create sophisticated plugins without much work.