In Chapter 1, Getting Started, you'll get your feet wet with the jQuery JavaScript library. The chapter begins with a description of jQuery and what it can do for you. It then walks you through downloading and setting up the library, as well as writing your first script.

In Chapter 2, Selecting Elements, you'll learn how to use jQuery's selector expressions and DOM traversal methods to find elements on the page, wherever they may be. You'll use jQuery to apply styling to a diverse set of page elements, sometimes in a way that pure CSS cannot.

In Chapter 3, Handling Events, you'll use jQuery's event-handling mechanism to fire off behaviors when browser events occur. You'll see how jQuery makes it easy to attach events to elements unobtrusively, even before the page finishes loading. Also, you'll get an overview of deeper topics, such as event bubbling, delegation, and namespacing.

In Chapter 4, Styling and Animating, you'll be introduced to jQuery's animation techniques and see how to hide, show, and move page elements with effects that are both useful and pleasing to the eye.

In Chapter 5, Manipulating the DOM, you'll learn how to change your page on command. This chapter will teach you how to alter the very structure of an HTML document, as well as its content, on the fly.

In Chapter 6, Sending Data with Ajax, you'll discover the many ways in which jQuery makes it easy to access server-side functionality without resorting to clunky page refreshes. With the basic components of the library well in hand, you will be ready to explore how the library can expand to fit your needs.

In Chapter 7, Using Plugins, will show you how to find, install, and use plugins, including the powerful jQuery UI plugin library.

In Chapter 8, Developing Plugins, you'll learn how to take advantage of jQuery's impressive extension capabilities to develop your own plugins from the ground up. You'll create your own utility functions, add jQuery object methods, and discover the jQuery UI widget factory. Next, you'll take a second tour through jQuery's building blocks, learning more advanced techniques.

In Chapter 9, Advanced Selectors and Traversing, you'll refine your knowledge of selectors and traversals, gaining the ability to optimize selectors for performance, manipulate the DOM element stack, and write plugins that expand selecting and traversing capabilities.

In Chapter 10, Advanced Events, you'll dive further into techniques such as delegation and throttling that can greatly improve event handling performance. You'll also create custom and special events that add even more capabilities to the jQuery library.

In Chapter 11, Advanced Effects, you'll fine-tune the visual effects jQuery can provide by crafting custom easing functions and reacting to each step of an animation. You'll gain the ability to manipulate animations as they occur, and schedule actions with custom queuing.

In Chapter 12, Advanced DOM Manipulation, you'll get more practice modifying the DOM, with techniques such as attaching arbitrary data to elements. You'll also learn how to extend the way jQuery processes CSS properties on elements.

In Chapter 13, Advanced Ajax, you'll achieve a greater understanding of Ajax transactions, including the jQuery deferred object system for handling data that may become available at a later time.

In Appendix A, JavaScript Closures, you'll gain a solid understanding of closures in JavaScript—what they are and how you can use them to your advantage.

In Appendix B, Testing JavaScript with QUnit, you'll learn about the QUnit library for unit testing of JavaScript programs. This library will add to your toolkit for developing and maintaining highly sophisticated web applications.

In Appendix C, Quick Reference, you'll get a glimpse of the entire jQuery library, including every one of its methods and selector expressions. Its easy-to-scan format is perfect for those moments when you know what you want to do, but you're just unsure about the right method name or selector.

In order to run the example code demonstrated in this book, you need a modern web browser such as Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, or Microsoft Internet Explorer.

To experiment with the examples and to work on the chapter-ending exercises, you will also need:

Additionally, to run some of the Ajax examples in Chapter 6 and beyond, you will need a PHP-enabled web server.

This book is for web designers who want to create interactive elements for their designs, and for developers who want to create the best user interface for their web applications. Basic JavaScript programming knowledge is required. You will need to know the basics of HTML and CSS, and should be comfortable with the syntax of JavaScript. No knowledge of jQuery is assumed, nor is experience with any other JavaScript libraries required.

By reading this book, you will become familiar with the functionality and syntax of jQuery 1.6.x, the latest version at the time of writing.

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: "This code illustrates that we can pass any kind of expression into the console.log() method."

A block of code is set as follows:

$('button.show-details').click(function() {
  $('div.details').show();
});

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

$('#switcher-narrow').bind('click', function() {
  $('body').removeClass().addClass('narrow');
});

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: "The Console tab will be of most frequent use to us while learning jQuery, as shown in the following screenshot".

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