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 – creating a featured content slider


We'll get started as usual by setting up our basic HTML file and associated files and folders, just like we did in Chapter 1, Designer, Meet jQuery.

  1. In the body of the HTML document, the HTML markup for our featured content slider will be very similar to the HTML we set up for a news ticker. The only difference is that I'm replacing the images with larger images since I want images to be the main focus of the slider. I'm using images that are 600 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall. The following is a sample of the HTML:

    <div class="jcarousel-skin-slider">
      <ul id="featured-carousel">
        <li>
          <a href="#"><img src="images/600/Switzerland.jpg" alt="Switzerland"/></a>
          <div class="info">
            <h4>Switzerland</h4>
            <p>Switzerland, officially the Swiss Confederation, is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities&lt...