Book Image

Learning jQuery - Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

Book Image

Learning jQuery - Fourth Edition - Fourth Edition

Overview of this book

To build interesting, interactive sites, developers are turning to JavaScript libraries such as jQuery to automate common tasks and simplify complicated ones. Because many web developers have more experience with HTML and CSS than with JavaScript, the library's design lends itself to a quick start for designers with little programming experience. Experienced programmers will also be aided by its conceptual consistency. LearningjQuery - Fourth Edition is revised and updated version of jQuery. You will learn the basics of jQuery for adding interactions and animations to your pages. Even if previous attempts at writing JavaScript have left you baffled, this book will guide you past the pitfalls associated with AJAX, events, effects, and advanced JavaScript language features. Starting with an introduction to jQuery, you will first be shown how to write a functioning jQuery program in just three lines of code. Learn how to add impact to your actions through a set of simple visual effects and to create, copy, reassemble, and embellish content using jQuery's DOM modification methods. The book will take you through many detailed, real-world examples, and even equip you to extend the jQuery library itself with your own plug-ins.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Learning jQuery Fourth Edition
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding the DOM


One of the most powerful aspects of jQuery is its ability to make selecting elements in the DOM easy. The DOM serves as the interface between JavaScript and a web page; it provides a representation of the source HTML as a network of objects rather than as plain text.

This network takes the form of a family tree of elements on the page. When we refer to the relationships that elements have with one another, we use the same terminology that we use when referring to family relationships: parents, children, and so on. A simple example can help us understand how the family tree metaphor applies to a document:

<html>
  <head>
    <title>the title</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div>
      <p>This is a paragraph.</p>
      <p>This is another paragraph.</p>
      <p>This is yet another paragraph.</p>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Here, <html> is the ancestor of all the other elements...