Pssssst! Wanna learn JQuery?

theme_forest_logo_link_topOne of the reasons why I always cringed from web front end in the past is that presentation is so “dirty.”  We have all felt the flames.

  • HTML was never really designed as a presentation language
  • confusion of XHTML validations and the different DOCTYPES
  • CSS is supposed to be for design
  • browser wars and their slight but MADDENING incompatibilities
  • people who think CSS is for fonts and colors and still use tables
  • Javascript  came out of the box as a pretty lame language in 1996.

The Javascript language has improved, but it’s still tedious, awkward, cost-ineffective, and painful to do modern effects in it from scratch. Javascript frameworks are libraries that attempt to discipline Javascript, define reusable functions for commonly done things, and basically make it usable.   A very popular framework is JQuery — a library and framework that makes doing whiz bangie front end things, including Ajax server actions, MUCH easier.  I’ve been going through the Theme Forest JQuery tutorials by Jeffrey Way for the past few weeks, and they are absolutely awesome.  They are tiny code sprints that handle one little thing per lesson, in a 7-10 minute Camtasia-style video.

Here is a link to the head of the series.  They are up to about 14 lessons at this writing, and I have no idea how many more they are going to do. I totally recommend it! After doing lesson 12, I was ready to try an original project. I took a low-res version of a popular culinary reference poster on dried chiles and made it into a Web 2.0 style image map. If you hover over the hot spots it pops up an enlarged image of that particular chile and a little blurb of info about it. Then I incorporated it into a blog post on my food blog. It took just a little additional tweaking to make it play nice with Word Press. Check out my interactive JQuery chile map, and if anyone knows why it fails to work inside frames, I’d love to know!

6 comments to Pssssst! Wanna learn JQuery?

  • I think I should focus on building my blog as an ordinary blog first before going too far on techie stuff. But reading about JQuery, it seems bring much benefits to a website. Must learn much more about it.

  • admin

    busby Thanks for dropping by~ yes definitely, if you are a blogger who is not a developer, visit wordpress.org and suggest your wizz bang idea as a plugin and get somebody else to do it. I don’t recommend Jquery to non developers unless they want to invest some serious time, and certainly not tweaking it into wordpress right off the bat!–that added a little heart burn to the process. I consider myself a developer first and foremost who happens to blog about cool dev. stuff.

    Cheers,
    Colleen

  • I am actually working through an Ajax book right now. I have a project I want to do and I think Ajax is going to be the best fit, however, I will probably use objects instead of XML.

    After I make it through the book, I will probably end up using Jquery, so will have to bookmark the tutorials and keep them on the back burner. I wanna learn the basics first though.

  • admin

    Just for the record, this example does not use Ajax, ie asynchronously go back to the server for anything. But Jquery certainly can do that!

  • It is possible to perform Ajax routines using the $.ajax and associated methods to load and manipulate remote data.

  • Definetly,the Javascript language has improved, but it is still awkward, cost-ineffective, and painful to do modern effects..
    And jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development…

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