Learning jQuery

Packt Publishing has just posted an excerpt of our new book Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques on their site. The excerpt covers table sorting, pagination, row highlighting/striping, and basic tooltips. It also gives a hat tip to Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street and Christian Bach of jQuery Table Sorter fame (by the way, Christian has just released version 2.0 of the plugin, and it's awesome!). Here is the summary:

In this article by Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer, we will use an online bookstore as our model website, but the techniques we cook up can be applied to a wide variety of other sites as well, from weblogs to portfolios, from market-facing business sites to corporate intranets.

In this article, we will use jQuery to apply techniques for increasing the readability, usability, and visual appeal of tables, though we are not dealing with tables used for layout and design. In fact, as the web standards movement has become more pervasive in the last few years, table-based layout has increasingly been abandoned in favor of CSS‑based designs. Although tables were often employed as a somewhat necessary stopgap measure in the 1990s to create multi-column and other complex layouts, they were never intended to be used in that way, whereas CSS is a technology expressly created for presentation.

But this is not the place for an extended discussion on the proper role of tables. Suffice it to say that in this article we will explore ways to display and interact with tables used as semantically marked up containers of tabular data. For a closer look at applying semantic, accessible HTML to tables, a good place to start is Roger Johansson's blog entry, Bring on the Tables at www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200410/bring_on_the_tables/.

Some of the techniques we apply to tables in this article can be found in plug‑ins such as Christian Bach's Table Sorter. For more information, visit the jQuery Plug‑in Repository at jQuery.com/plugins.

You can read the full article/excerpt or check out the table-manipulation demos here and here.