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 – simple custom scrollbars


You can see that the operating system's default scrollbars stick out like a sore thumb in the middle of our nicely designed page. Let's fix that, shall we?

  1. First, we've got to get our hands on the plugin we'd like to use to create our custom scrollbars. Head over to http://jscrollpane.kelvinluck.com/ and click on the Download link in the navigation menu:

    This will jump you down to the Download section of the site, where you'll see Kelvin Luck is using Github to host his code. Github is a social coding hub – a sort of Facebook for developers – where the main focus is on writing, sharing, and discussing code. Hosting jQuery plugins and other open source code projects with Github is becoming more and more common these days as Github offers developers an easy way to share and collaborate on their code with others.

    Don't worry – downloading a plugin from Github is simple. I'll walk you through it.

  2. First, click the Github link on Kelvin Luck's site:

  3. That will...