Web Development with jQuery®

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INTRODUCTION

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The jQuery UI library also gives you the ability to make any element draggable with the mouse

cursor; by clicking, holding and moving the mouse, you can move elements around a page to any

position you like. It also makes it easy to create drag-and-drop user interfaces. You can use jQuery

UI to make droppable zones, where you take elements from other parts of a page and drop them on

another, similarly to how you might interact with your operating system’s fi le manager when you

want to move a folder from one place to another. You can also make lists that are sortable via drag-

and-drop, rearranging elements based on where you drop them. You can have a user interface where

you drag the mouse cursor to make a selection, as you would in your operating system’s fi le man-

ager when you want to select more than one fi le or folder. jQuery UI exposes the ability to resize

elements on a page using the mouse. All the things that you can imagine doing on your computer’s

desktop, or within an application, you can do in a web browser with jQuery UI.

jQuery UI also provides a widget for entering a date into a fi eld using a nice, accessible JavaScript-

driven calendar that pops up when you click on an input fi eld.

You can make custom pop-up dialogs that are like virtual pop-up windows, except they don’t open

a separate browser window—they display using markup, CSS, and JavaScript.

Another widget that jQuery UI provides is a graphical slider bar, similar to your media player’s

volume control.

As jQuery has done for JavaScript programming in general, jQuery UI strives to do for redundant

graphical user interface (GUI) tasks. jQuery UI gives you the ability to make professional user-inter-

face widgets with much less development effort.

If you’re interested in reading news about jQuery, how it’s evolving, and topics related to web devel-

opment, you may be interested in reading the offi cial jQuery blog at blog.jquery.com or jQuery’s

creator John Resig’s blog at http://www.ejohn.org.

If you need help, you can participate in programming discussions at p2p.wrox.com, which you can

join for free, to ask programming questions in moderated forums. There are also programming

forums provided by the jQuery community, which you can learn more about at http://docs.jquery.

com/Discussion.

HOW THIS BOOK IS STRUCTURED

This book is divided into four parts: The fi rst covers the basic API exposed by the jQuery library;

the second covers the jQuery UI library; and the third covers a few popular jQuery plugins, as

well as how to make a more advanced jQuery plugin. Finally, the appendices contain useful

reference material.

Part 1: The jQuery API

➤ (^) Chapter 1: Introduction to jQuery—This chapter discusses where jQuery came from and why
it is needed. It includes some good programming practices and the specifi c programming con-
ventions used in this book. The chapter ends with a walkthrough of downloading your fi rst
jQuery-enabled JavaScript.
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