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 – building deluxe asynchronous navigation


To add some missing functionality to our asynchronous navigation, we're going to use Ben Alman's excellent jQuery BBQ plugin. Even though that name might make you feel hungry, BBQ stands for Back Button and Query in this case. We'll keep working with the files we created in the last example.

  1. First, we'll need to get a copy of the BBQ plugin to work with. Head over to http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/ to get the download file and the documentation and examples for the jQuery BBQ plugin.

    As usual, we're going to download the minified version of the plugin and drop it into our scripts folder alongside jQuery and our scripts.js file.

  2. Next, open up each of the HTML pages of your mini website and add the BBQ plugin, after jQuery and before scripts.js:

    <script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/jquery.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="scripts/jquery.ba-bbq.min.js"></script>
    <script type...