Part of Packt's Beginner's Guide series, each chapter focuses on a specific part of your website and how to improve its design with the use of jQuery. There are plenty of screenshots and practical step-by-step instructions making it easy to apply jQuery to your site. This book is for designers who have the basics of HTML and CSS, but want to extend their knowledge by learning to use JavaScript and jQuery.
This book is designed for the designers who have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS and would like to advance their skill set by learning basic JavaScript. If you have not written any JavaScript before, then this book will help you in writing your first JavaScript code using jQuery library.
Now let’s dive into each of the chapters to find out more.
Chapter 1, Designer, Meet jQuery, is an introduction to the jQuery library and JavaScript. In this chapter authors talks about the following points in a simple manner:
1. What jQuery is and why it’s ideal for designers 2. Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation 3. JavaScript basics 4. Downloading jQuery 5. Your first jQuery script
It is a wonderful chapter to begin with as it has beautifully introduced jQuery to people in a very easy and step-by-step manner.
Chapter 2, Enhancing Links, will teach you how to use jQuery to turn a list of links into simple tabs. And also explains how to customize tool tips and introduces one to plugin concept. Author highlights the HTML mark up, then adds small chunks of jQuery code and finally completes the demonstration with CSS addition.
Readers’ can test their understanding through Pop Quiz introduced in the chapter.
Chapter 3, Making a Better FAQ Page, will help you to learn the following sub-topics:
1. How to traverse an HTML document with jQuery 2. How to show and hide elements 3. How to use simple jQuery animations 4. How to easily toggle a class name for an element
As before, step-by-step html code creation, adding jQuery scripts to it and explanation of those code blocks will definitely help people in understanding jQuery concepts.
Chapter 4, Building an Interactive Navigation Menu, will walk you through the creation of a fully functional and visually stunning drop-down and fly-out menus. Author has used a jQuery plug-in called Superfish menu along with required CSS styles to enhance a CSS horizontal drop-down menu.
This chapter will guide you to set up a navigation menu that consists of a set of nested lists, forming a hierarchy. Then it will attach a CSS file to add simple drop-down functionality to that menu. Moreover to add more behaviors, the Superfish plugin is used.
Clear and concise, Natalie's exposition is a fitted approach for designers who want to learn the basic principles of web creation nowadays. Among other things, It shows the most trending practices in web design as grateful degradation and css3 shapes as a sort of examples. First to note, it's how carefully shows the programming concepts, and jquery ones to people who are not in a development role. His main strength it's the metodism used to explain step by step each of the solutions proposed to solve common design scenarios. Starting with a common project structure, next the solution for JavaScript disabled browsers and then the jQuery plugin choose for the chapter. But, this comes with some drawbacks, though. Originally, it seems that the readers are going to learn programming skills, exclusively jQuery, at a minimum level to do theirs work. However, after a short introduction to jQuery, the book is based more in how to use a sort of chosen jQuery plugins than to learn basic skills to get benefits from that. The title seems contradictory and the readers may fall down in a recipe way read, sometimes bored, or sometimes repetitive. I appreciate the selected plugins and the concepts around design that provides along the chapters, but it lacks of jQuery learning basis, as the title suggest. Finally, no developers can get benefits from this reading, unluckily, while designers may get some tools, filtered by the author, and a short introduction to these, so that they can start improving their web sites in few minutes.
Clear and concise, Natalie's exposition is a fitted approach for designers who want to learn the basic principles of web creation nowadays. Among other things, It shows the most trending practices in web design as grateful degradation and css3 shapes as a sort of examples. First to note, it's how carefully shows the programming concepts, and jquery ones to people who are not in a development role. His main strength it's the metodism used to explain step by step each of the solutions proposed to solve common design scenarios. Starting with a common project structure, next the solution for JavaScript disabled browsers and then the jQuery plugin choose for the chapter. But, this comes with some drawbacks, though. Originally, it seems that the readers are going to learn programming skills, exclusively jQuery, at a minimum level to do theirs work. However, after a short introduction to jQuery, the book is based more in how to use a sort of chosen jQuery plugins than to learn basic skills to get benefits from that. The title seems contradictory and the readers may fall down in a recipe way read, sometimes bored, or sometimes repetitive. I appreciate the selected plugins and the concepts around design that provides along the chapters, but it lacks of jQuery learning basis, as the title suggest. Finally, no developers can get benefits from this reading, unluckily, while designers may get some tools, filtered by the author, and a short introduction to these, so that they can start improving their web sites in few minutes.
Clear and concise, Natalie's exposition is a fitted approach for designers who want to learn the basic principles of web creation nowadays. Among other things, It shows the most trending practices in web design as grateful degradation and css3 shapes as a sort of examples. First to note, it's how carefully shows the programming concepts, and jquery ones to people who are not in a development role. His main strength it's the metodism used to explain step by step each of the solutions proposed to solve common design scenarios. Starting with a common project structure, next the solution for JavaScript disabled browsers and then the jQuery plugin choose for the chapter. But, this comes with some drawbacks, though. Originally, it seems that the readers are going to learn programming skills, exclusively jQuery, at a minimum level to do theirs work. However, after a short introduction to jQuery, the book is based more in how to use a sort of chosen jQuery plugins than to learn basic skills to get benefits from that. The title seems contradictory and the readers may fall down in a recipe way read, sometimes bored, or sometimes repetitive. I appreciate the selected plugins and the concepts around design that provides along the chapters, but it lacks of jQuery learning basis, as the title suggest. Finally, no developers can get benefits from this reading, unluckily, while designers may get some tools, filtered by the author, and a short introduction to these, so that they can start improving their web sites in few minutes.
"jQuery for Designers: Beginner's Guide" starts with an introduction about jQuery. What exactly is jQuery and what is the difference between jQuery and JavaScript? Why do you need jQuery or is JavaScript enough?
The book covers jQuery step-by-step. First you learn how to install jQuery and make it ready for use on your webpages.
Even for persons with little experience with web development the examples are easy to follow. Everything is explained in detail and all the code and plugins that are used in the book are available to the reader.
The book describes the several topics jQuery can be used for. Scrollbars, menus, lightboxes and slideshows are only some of the topics that are covered and explained in detail. Every chapter deals with a different part of jQuery and shows the power of jQuery to the reader.
Even though I've been offered a copy of "jQuery for Designers" for free in exchange for a review, I'll definitely use the book as a reference in future projects.
Today it’s difficult to talk about javascript, without mentioning jQuery, jQuery is a javascript library (most used), that makes it easier to interact with HTML documents, manipulate the DOM, handling events, developing animations, and add interaction with AJAX technique in web pages. In this book discover
In this book we discover how to start working with jQuery into our html projects and how to modify the content of our blog to make it more interesting, how to build interactive menus for our website, how to create Slideshows and Sliders for our photos, how to working with Responsive Designs, and how to create effects with the scroll, etc… with simple examples for each of the many tasks that make up the book (this is a book with a lot of pages).
This is a very good book, especially recommended for designers and front-end developers with minimum knowledge in javascript in front-end environments.