Recap: An Idiot's Guide to jQuery
August 13, 2010 Zerek Welz
For our August presentation, we had a Mark Casias give us a run down over jQuery. Mark went over how it $.fn works, showed some useful resources and showed us some cute baby animals.
In case you missed it or need a quick refresh, read on:
Recap
- jQuery has a small footprint, strong documentation, a helpful community and it's open source.
- One of the most important and useful methods is
$().ready(). - Uses standard CSS selectors for working with DOM elements.
- Able to manipulate elements by adding/removing classes, insert new content/HTML and reposition elements.
- Able to bind events unobtrusively to DOM elements:
$("#divId").click(function() { $("#dialog").open(); } );$("#divId").bind("click", function() { $("#dialog").open(); } );- No functional difference between the two.
- Only need to select an element once by chaining jQuery methods:
$("#divId").click(function() { $("#dialog").open(); } ).css("background-color", "pink");
- Easy to use Ajax options. Allows passing data objects to the server.
- Using Ajax can use various data types such as: JSON, HTML, XSL, text and more.
- jQuery UI has easy to use tools to help make a slick UI: accordions, dialogs, date pickers, autocomplete, tabs and more!
- jQuery UI has a theme roller to do a lot of the CSS work for you.
- Allows third party plugins to be used. Most things you need someone has probably already created.
- Autocomplete was a user created plugin that is now included in jQuery UI.
- Accessibility? Write POSH and use semantic HTML. jQuery won't interfere with what the screen readers.
- Plenty of alternative libraries if you don't want jQuery: YUI (Yahoo), Sencha, Dojo and others.
- More resources:
- jQuery Fundamentals
- YayQuery podcast
- Tons of books and online resources
- And Markie, the polar bear
Slide Deck
An Idiot's Guide to jQuery is available on Slideshare:
Video
Video of the presentation is available on Vimeo:
Photos
Photos are available on Flickr:
Coming in September!
Our next presentation is No gEEk? No problem! on September 1, 2010, beginning at 6:30pm at One Up.
Caroline C. Blaker, a local developer specializing in ExpressionEngine, will take you through EE's features and capabilities.
As a special treat, our very own Emily Lewis will kick-off our September with presentation a short, 10-minute demonstration of EllisLab's (the makers of ExpressionEngine) new publishing engine, MojoMotor.
Registration for our September event is not yet open, but be sure to mark your calendar! We'll be opening registration up about two weeks prior to the presentation and will notify our members across our various social networks, as well as on this site.
Don't Miss Future Events!
In addition to keeping you up–to–date on this site, we also push news to our friends and followers across social networks:
You can also add our schedule to your Google Calendar. Or download to your address book.
A Special Thanks to Our Volunteers
- Samantha Metheny, photos
- Brooks Walch, live tweets
- Zerek Welz, recap
- Peter Howley, end–of–year survey
Want to help? Let us know if you'd like to lend a hand. Interested in speaking next year? Let us know that too!
More Local Events & News
- Quelab is opening August 7, 7 pm, 1112 2nd St NW. There will be pie.
- Next ABQ Web Geeks is August 18 at O'niells in Nob Hill, 6 pm. Special "geek swap" event starts at 7:15 pm.
- Brian Arnold is starting a new JavaScript group, which will probably meet quarterly and cover more specific JS topics; more in-depth. Contact Brian for more info (brianarn on Gmail).
- Duke City Tech is a new podcast covering anything related to tech in ABQ. Still in "beta," looking to do interview. Email DCT for more information.
- AIGA NM is having a Summer Social on August 13 in Santa Fe.