jQuery 1.4 Animation Techniques: Beginners Guide

04/08/2011 · No Responses

jQuery is a cross-browser JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML, and is the most popular JavaScript library in use today. Using the features offered by jQuery, developers are able to create dynamic web pages. This book will act as a resource for you to create animation and advanced special effects in your web applications, by following the easy-to-understand steps mentioned in it.

jQuery 1.4 Animation Techniques: Beginners Guide will allow you to master animation in jQuery to produce slick and attractive interfaces that respond to your visitors’ interactions. You will learn everything you need to know about creating engaging and effective web page animations using jQuery. The book uses many examples and explains how to create animations using an easy, step-by-step, beginners guide approach.

This book provides various examples that gradually build up the reader’s knowledge and practical experience in using the jQuery API to create stunning animations. The book starts off by explaining how animations make your user interface interactive and attractive. It explains the various methods used to make the element being animated appear or disappear. It provides a set of steps to create simple animations and show fading animations.

You can later learn how to make complex animations by chaining different effects together as well as how to halt a currently running application. You will find out how to slide your animation elements and learn to create custom animations that can be complex and specialized.

You will find out how to obtain and set up the jQuery UI— the official user interface library for jQuery. The book will tell you how to animate a page’s background image, and will teach you how to make images scroll in a certain direction and at a certain speed depending on the movement of the mouse pointer

Learn how to create engaging and interactive user interfaces, and attractive special effects using jQuery

What you will learn from this book :

Implement subtle UI effects, user-triggered animations and full-page feature animations to animate the user interface of your web applications
Fade, hide, shrink, and slide your animations using jQuery’s built-in animation helper methods
Create custom animations using jQuery’s animate() method
Discover how the animation queue works and how it can be manipulated to create complex animations
Simulate animation in a variety of ways using other non-animation-specific jQuery methods
Discover how jQuery can be used to make the latest CSS3 and canvas animations work cross-browser
Obtain and set up jQuery UI— the official user interface library for jQuery
Define custom animations that can be complex and specialized
Extend the jQuery library with brand new functions and methods in the form of plugins
Get your images scrolled in a certain direction, and at a certain speed, depending on the movements of the mouse pointer
Create a continuous header animation manually with just a few lines of code

Approach
All the concepts in the book are explained in a simple, easy to understand, step-by-step manner. There are plenty of examples and images used in this book, with the images properly explained. Written with a friendly and engaging approach, this Packt Beginner’s guide is designed to be placed alongside the computer as your guide and mentor to create attractive web page animations using jQuery.

Who this book is written for
This book is written for web designers and front-end developers who already have good knowledge of HTML and CSS, and some experience with jQuery. If you want to learn how to animate the user interface of your web applications with jQuery, then this book is for you.