Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By : Natalie Maclees
Book Image

jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide

By: Natalie Maclees

Overview of this book

jQuery is awesome for designers ñ it builds easily on the CSS and HTML you already know and allows you to create impressive effects with just a few lines of code. However, without a background in programming, JavaScript ñ on which jQuery is built ñ can feel intimidating and impossible to grasp. This book will show you how simple it can be to learn the basics and then extend your capabilities by taking advantage of jQuery plugins.jQuery for Designers offers approachable lessons for designers with little or no background in JavaScript. The book begins by introducing the jQuery library and a small and simple introduction to JavaScript. Then you'll step through a few simple tasks to get your feet wet before diving into using plugins to quickly and simply add complex effects with just a few lines of code.You'll be surprised at how far you can get with JavaScript when you start with the power of the jQuery library and this book will show you how. We'll cover common interface widgets and effects such as tabbed interfaces, custom tooltips, and custom scrollbars. You'll learn how to create an animated navigation menu and how to add simple AJAX effects to enhance your site visitors' experience. Then we'll wrap up with interactive data grids which make sorting and searching data easy.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
jQuery for Designers Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Designer, Meet jQuery

You might have heard quite a lot about jQuery over the past couple of years—it's quickly become one of the most popular code packages in use on the Web today. And you might have wondered what all the fuss was about.

Whether you've tried to figure out JavaScript before and have thrown up your hands in frustration or have been too intimidated to even give it a go, you'll find that jQuery is a wonderfully approachable and relatively easy to learn approach to getting your feet wet with JavaScript.

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • What jQuery is and why it's ideal for designers

  • Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation

  • JavaScript basics

  • Downloading jQuery

  • Your first jQuery script