Beginning HTML and CSS

Chapter 12

jQuery: Beyond the Basics

What You Will Learn in This Chapter

• How to work with Ajax and jQuery
• What jQuery UI is and how it can help you make more interactive web pages

Wrox.com Code Downloads for this Chapter

You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9781118340189 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 12 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

With the basics of jQuery in hand, it’s time to dive a little bit further into what jQuery has to offer. This includes a look at working with a technology called Ajax and the powerful jQuery UI library, which enable you to build rich interactive components with a little bit of code.

Ajax with jQuery

If you had to choose one reason why JavaScript went from an also-ran to being one of the most important programming languages on the planet, a good choice would be a technology pattern called Ajax. The Ajax era in web development, starting in the mid-2000s, has driven enormous interest and development in JavaScript libraries, browsers, and the language itself.

So what is Ajax?

The easiest way to describe it is to first think of the basic web page interaction. As you learned in Chapter 3, “Links and Navigation,” links enable users to navigate from page to page. When this happens a new HTML document is requested from the server, and all the JavaScript, CSS, and images that make up the page need to be loaded to render the page. ...