Today’s entrance is about a new book review. The book is jQuery UI 1.10: The User Interface Library for jQuery, available at Packt Publishing, a specialized store where you can find really cool books if you are a developer, DBA or you are looking for tech books.
jQuery UI, the GUI library
jQuery UI is one of the libraries I use in almost all my projects, basically because I like the Tab control, dialogs, the datepicker is really useful , and the Tooltips. I haven’t need to use other widgets, or at least, not until now, but thanks to this book I have improve my knowledge of this library and now I starting to use accordeon, drag and drop, effect, the CSS properties included and more.
The book explained with full details how this library is build, showing the reader all its potential, for beginners and increasing dificulty step by step, with nice examples: learning to use this library is easy thanks to this book.
Chapter 1 explain where you can download the library, the structure, browsers supported, licences, and the how to use the API (this feature has been improved with newer versions). Chapter 2 is focused in the CSS framework, something I didn’t know, mainly because I use to work with PureCSS.
Chapters 3 to 10 are concentrated on widgets: tabs, accordeons, dialogs, datepicker, tooltips, … How to start using a widget and how to improve the use of it. Maybe chapter 11 is one that you should stop reading carefully, because it’s dedicated to drag and drop, and chapter 12 is about resizing, a very important topic if you are a front-end developer and are aware of responsive design. Chapter 13 talks about select and sort (another issue I must learn to include on future projects), and the chapter 14 show how powerful you can get with effects (another issue I must study!).
I suppose that after reading this book, I must write a few articles on how to use this library with small examples, but I would recommend you to buy the book!
Downloading jQuery UI
If you are going to start using jQuery UI, the first thing you need to know is that it is based on jQuery and all sintax for starting, configuring and manipulating the widgets are based on standart jQuery and Javascript. There is a ThemeRoller to create your themes, or use predefined ones. All are very proffesional.
You can download jQuery UI here: http://jqueryui.com/download/. I have downloaded the last stable version, but if you are advanced user, you can customize your library including only what you need. Everything you need is on the CSS and JS directories.
ThemeRoller is one of the tools I like the most, mainly because you can customize the theme to use on your widgets, or even you can modify one of them to create your own theme. Once finished, you download the code of your theme, ready to use, by including the files on the CSS and JS directories … and you’re done!
About browsers, only you can have troubles if you use IE, and after jQuery 1.11, IE8+ will not be supported, so you need to update your browser or move to another one, such as Firefox, Chrome, …
Happy coding and buy the book jQuery UI 1.10: The User Interface Library for jQuery!