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

About the Author

Natalie MacLees is a frontend web developer and UI designer. She spends her days on the product team at Geni (geni.com), a Los Angeles-based startup that is crowdsourcing the creation of a single family tree of the world. Together with Noel Saw she heads up the Southern California WordPress User's Group (socalwp.org), organizing WordPress meetups, help sessions, and workshops. In 2010, she worked as a technical reviewer on WordPress 3 Complete by April Hodge Silver. She makes her online home at nataliemac.com.

Her obsession with the Web began when she bought her first computer in 1996 and promptly used it to build her first website. She spends the few moments she manages to be offline each day watching baseball, crafting, reading, baking, bellydancing, collecting Hello Kitty items, and avoiding avocados and olives at all costs. She lives in Los Angeles in eternal hope of developing so many freckles, they'll all touch and make a tan.

Gracious thanks first and foremost to John Resig and the rest of the jQuery team for creating and sharing such a useful and elegant library with the rest of us. Thank you to Houman Allahverdi for being patient while I spent so many hours at the computer, telling him to turn off the TV so I could concentrate. Thank you to Anna Motzer, Mark Tapio Kines, Tammy Wilson, Kimberly Wilkinson, Vanesa Rey, Marlene Angel, Trisha Marcy, Ed Doolittle, LeHang Huynh, Marco Hernandez, McCabe Russell, Teresina Goheen, and Ninno DePatrick for their support, advice, and cheerleading —I couldn't ask for better friends. Thank you to my sisters, Stefanie Elder and Bethany MacLees for being properly impressed that somebody wanted me to write a book. Thank you to my mom, Patricia Demby, and stepfather, John Demby, for being proud of me no matter what. And finally, thank you to Diane Colella Jones for believing in me, even before I did.