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

Designer, meet plugins


We've already talked about how programmers solve the same problems over and over again. It's these common tasks that jQuery simplifies so that we can accomplish these tasks with a minimum amount of code. But what about the tasks that are only somewhat common, like the desire for beautiful custom scrollbars that work?

That's where the jQuery community becomes important. Developers in the jQuery community are able to write code that extends the functionality of jQuery to simplify tasks that are only somewhat common. These bits of code are called Plugins and they are used in conjunction with the jQuery library to make coding complex interactions, widgets, and effects as simple as using the features already built into jQuery.

You'll find a library of hundreds of jQuery plugins on the official jQuery site. In addition to those, there are literally thousands more available from sites across the Web for just about any task you want to accomplish.

To create custom scrollbars...