The Joy of jQuery: A Beginner’s Guide to the World’s Most Popular Javascript Library

The Joy of jQuery

From the #1 best-selling author of  “The Joy of PHP” comes the easiest way to learn jQuery.

jQuery is a shortcut that you can use to create seriously cool web applications. It’s free, powerful, easy to include in your web pages, and relatively easy to learn.  You can get started quickly, and you won’t outgrow it later when you get really good at it. Millions of programmers will agree that learning jQuery is well worth the time and effort.

Frankly, it’s just plain fun too. That’s what inspired me to write this book.

Most programming books are dry and boring, and while you can’t get away from all of that, this book uses the persona of a used car sales person in all the examples to give the learning both context and humor.  By the way, all the source code referenced the book is available for free download.

jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. What’s a JavaScript library, you ask?  A library is really just a fancy way of saying that it is a collection of pre-existing routines that you can make use of without needing to understand how they work.  It’s a bit like saying that an automobile is a “car-parts library”.   You don’t need to understand how the car’s transmission works to make your car go fast, you only need to understand how the gas pedal works.  jQuery is the same way. You don’t need to understand how jQuery works to make your website do cool things either.  You just need to know how to access it.  That’s what this book will teach you.

With a combination of versatility and extensibility, jQuery has changed the way that millions of people write JavaScript and this book will change the way you write your web applications.

Table of Contents

• Title Page
• What is jQuery?
• Getting Started with jQuery
• Introduction to HTML
• Introduction to CSS
• jQuery Selectors
• Using jQuery for Form Validation
• jQuery UI Widgets: Dramatic Page Enhancements
• jQuery Mobile
• jQuery AJAX
• jQuery Animation
• Author’s Note