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

Simple asynchronous navigation


In the early days of the Web, one solution to the repeated identical content download problem was frames. If you're too new to web development to remember, frames presented a way to break a single-page view into several different HTML files—navigating through the site involved reloading one or more of the frames while the others stayed the same. Frames helped a website to load faster and made a site easier to maintain, but in the end, they created more problems than they solved. Framed websites were easily broken, were difficult for search engines to index, often broke the back and forward buttons, and made it difficult or impossible for the site visitors to bookmark pages, share links, or print content. Because of all these problems, the use of frames has fallen out of favor.

More recently, single-page applications have started to become more popular. If you log into your Twitter account and start clicking around, you'll notice that the whole page refreshes...