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

Summary


We covered a lot of ground in this chapter. We learned how to use the qTip plugin to replace the browser's default tooltips with custom-designed tooltips. We saw how to take the customization a bit further by adding speech-bubble tooltips to a navigation bar. And finally, we used Ajax to pull in some external content, customizing not only the appearance of the tooltip, but also pulling in custom content, adding a title bar and close button, ensuring the tooltip would always be visible, and customizing the show and hide behaviors of the tooltip. I hope that you can see how flexible the qTip plugin is and how many uses it can have beyond just customizing the appearance of tooltips. Have fun experimenting with all the different settings listed in the plugin's documentation and see how creative you can be in customizing the appearance of your tooltips.

Next up, we'll take a look at creating nicely designed and animated dropdown navigation menus.