JavaScript & JQuery Interactive Front-End Web Development

The book takes a far more visual approach than other titles, with lots of diagrams, infographics, and lifestyle photography, following the same format as HTML & CSS (design and build websites). The audience of that title has already shown a strong interest in a book on JavaScript in this format. Unlike the majority of books on JavaScript or JQuery, this title covers both (because JQuery makes it easier and faster to develop your own scripts), and it does not assume experience of either of these technologies. It will make use of some popular JQuery plugins to illustrate techniques that would otherwise require many pages of detailed explanation (if the reader were being taught to create the plugins from scratch themselves). By explaining how it works, we can use fewer pages and still explain the same core concepts (simultaneously showing readers how to use JQuery plugins rather than writing scripts from scratch). The book will make it clear that it will explain the jargon of programming clearly and simply to those who do not understand the vocabulary (rather than pretending to be jargon-free), which is important because the reader does need to know these terms if they are to understand how to use many of the JQuery plugins available and understand their documentation. The book also has some very timely features (not covered in competing titles) including: Mentions of CSS transforms where they are a good alternative to JavaScript Responsive design techniques Using JavaScript to serve images for Retina displays. Along the way, the book will include many pro-tips to attract the attention of people who already know a bit of JavaScript and make them feel like they are still learning something new.

Jon Duckett has?been designing and building web sites for over a decade, working with global brands, and has authored and co-authored over a dozen books on web design, programming, usability and accessibility. He has curated conferences about web programming and has been a web strategy consultant, often coding front ends for projects and designing architectures for back end programming.

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: The ABC of Programming 11

Chapter 2: Basic JavaScript Instructions 53

Chapter 3: Functions, Methods & Objects 85

Chapter 4: Decisions & Loops 145

Chapter 5: Document Object Model 183

Chapter 6: Events 243

Chapter 7: jQuery 293

Chapter 8: Ajax & JSON 367

Chapter 9: APIs 409

Chapter 10: Error Handling & Debugging 449

Chapter 11: Content Panels 487

Chapter 12: Filtering, Searching & Sorting 527

Chapter 13: Form Enhancement & Validation 567

Index 623