jQuery Essentials

Optimize and implement the features of JQuery to build and maintain your websites with minimum hassle

About This Book

• Build dynamic websites efficiently without any performance issues
• Learn to use existing jQuery plugins and or write your own for your websites
• This is the most up-to-date book on the market at the moment, packed with detailed explanations and real-world examples

Who This Book Is For

Whether you are a beginner or an experienced developer who is looking for quick answers, you will find what you need in this book.

What You Will Learn

• Quickly find and modify HTML DOM elements
• Use animation to add flair to your site
• Create your own events to decouple your application
• Measure the performance of your website's JavaScript
• Write unit tests to ensure that your application is behaving correctly
• Use plugins to to save reinventing the wheel and enhance your site quickly
• Use client-side validation on forms to prevent your users from sending bad data to your application
• Write your own jQuery plugins in order to encapsulate your company's business logic

In Detail

JQuery is still the most popular JavaScript library. It is used in over 60% of the top websites on the Internet. It was written to make DOM manipulation (so, moving things around a web page) easier for developers. It acts through JavaScript to ascribe HTML elements to the DOM attributes. Because it is a library of predefined functions, all you need to start using jQuery is a working knowledge of the syntax and a reference for the functions available to you.

This practical guide shows you how to make the most of jQuery to boost the performance of your websites and applications. We start off with a quick glance through the basics of JQuery, followed by the explanation of JQuery selectors, filters, and DOM element manipulation. After this, you will learn how events and animations can be used to create and design beautiful and user-friendly sites. Next, you will be familiarized with Ajax functions to help you send and receive data from your server. Finally, we'll walk you through using built-in plugins and eventually create your own plugins for your websites.

By the end of this book, you will be able to to build robust and efficient websites successfully using JQuery.

Style and approach

This book takes a fast but thorough walk through jQuery. The goal is to get you writing fast and efficient jQuery quickly. It uses easy-to-read, jargon-free text and lots of ready-to-use code examples.