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

Basic data grid


We'll get started by using the DataTables plugin to create a basic data grid, keeping the default settings and the styles provided with the data grid. Data grids are most helpful when we have large amounts of data to present, and site visitors might want to filter and sort the data in different ways to find the information they are looking for. Think, for example, of a list of flights—one site visitor might be interested in sorting the flights by departure time to find the earliest possible departure, while another site visitor might want to sort the flights by duration to find the shortest possible flight.

Presenting the data in an interactive data grid allows each site visitor to quickly and easily find just the information they're looking for in a sea of information. For site visitors with JavaScript disabled, they'll simply see a large table of data and will never know that they're missing out on the interactive features. All of the information will still be available...