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 11. Creating an Interactive Data Grid

While you might not consider a data grid to be all that exciting, they do offer a way for site visitors to interact with large amounts of data and understand it in a way they might not be able to otherwise. One of the most exciting developments in HTML5 is the introduction of a grid element, which allows us to easily create an interactive data grid using only markup. However, it's one of the new elements for which browser support is lagging—there is little, if any, browser support for the time being, and it could be years before we're able to make use of this new element. Luckily, we can use jQuery to fill in the gap until the new grid element is ready for primetime.

In this chapter, we'll learn the following topics:

  • Turning an ordinary table into an interactive data grid using the DataTables jQuery plugin from Allan Jardine

  • Customizing the appearance and behavior of the data grid with help from the jQuery UI Themeroller