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

Validating user entry


Sometimes it can feel frustrating for a site visitor when they have to submit a form several times over, correcting errors that they've made filling it out. Without JavaScript, the only way to validate the information the site visitor has entered is to wait for them to submit the form, then identify the issues on the server, and send back a page that contains the form along with any error messages that might help the site visitor correct the problem.

Showing errors as soon as they happen goes a long way toward making your form feel snappy and responsive and helping your site visitors submit the form correctly on the first try. In this section, we'll learn how to use the Validation plugin from Jörn Zaefferer. This plugin is powerful and flexible and can handle validation in several different ways. We'll take a look at the most straightforward way of adding client-side validation to your form.