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 2. Enhancing Links

We take links for granted these days, but the truth of the matter is that the humble link is the thing that revolutionized documents and made the Web as we know it today possible. Being able to link a reader directly to another document or to another place within a document had never been possible before.

Because of this, you could say that hyperlinks are the backbone of the Internet—without them search engines wouldn't be possible, nor would most websites. Let's take a look at some ways we can make links work even harder for us.

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • How to open links in a new window

  • How to add icons to links to identify what type of document we are linking to

  • How to turn a list of links into simple tabs