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

Time for action – adding up and down arrows


Let's add top and bottom buttons to our scrollbars so our scrollbars look and behave more like native scrollbars.

  1. Let's go back to that line of code in our scripts.js file where we called the jScrollPane() method to create the custom scrollbars:

    $('#scrolling').jScrollPane();

    Remember how we could pass things to methods and functions by putting them inside the parentheses? We had the following example:

    dog.eat('bacon');

    where we wanted to say that the dog was eating bacon. So, in JavaScript-speak we passed bacon to the eat method of the dog.

    Well, in this case, we can pass a set of options to the jScrollPane method to control how our scrollbars look and act. We want to show the top and bottom arrows on our scrollbars, and we can do that by setting the showArrows option to true. We just have to make a simple modification to our line of code as follows:

    $('#scrolling').jScrollPane({showArrows:true});
  2. Now when you refresh the page, you'll see boxes at the...