Thread

I just found this tutorial for creating an accordion menu, and it’s really good so I thought I’d pop it on here.

Takes you through building the menu from start to end, and explains what each bit of the code does. It’s quite basic so not much use if you’ve had exposure to jQuery but if you haven’t, have a go at this and see what you’ve been missing (and what EE2 will be using!)

Thanks Andy - this will be perfect for me. Learning Jquery/javascript is high on my priority list right now.

Don’t forget the handy cheat sheet!

Andy,

What I’m curious about is whether people can learn jQuery without necessarily knowing Javascript itself? I’ve had some headaches with it, even with some purchased books, and a lot seem to reference DOM and XML to some degree, which I’m not the most familiar with.

I’m waiting for a Packt Publishing book about Javascript due later this month that will hopefully clear some things up for me, but no guarantees I suppose.

I’m by no means an expert, but I would say that having an understanding of the DOM is more important than knowing javascript itself, you can certainly get by with jQuery without needing to learn javascript but it’s always helpful.

For learning DOM/JS, I found these books to be excellent, and I’m still only a part of the way through the second one:

DOM scripting

AdvancED DOM scripting

Hiya,

Yep a good tutorial that one saw it when it came out back in May. Don’t miss the Coda Effect Tutorial too. Another great one there!

Best wishes,

Mark

I’m by no means an expert, but I would say that having an understanding of the DOM is more important than knowing javascript itself, you can certainly get by with jQuery without needing to learn javascript but it’s always helpful.

For learning DOM/JS, I found these books to be excellent, and I’m still only a part of the way through the second one:

DOM scripting

AdvancED DOM scripting

Thanks for the links Andy.. Since I’m going straight to learning DOM scripting for the benefits of jQuery, would you reckon that I’d be using these as more of a reference rather than actual practice? So granted I give it a few reads and understand DOM scripting more in general, that I would be more fitted with jQuery? I don’t know if I’d go the degree of learning it completely, since I’d probably exclusively (at least for the unforeseen future) be sticking with a Javascript framework like jQuery.

Thanks for the links as well. DOM scripting has baffled me for a good bit now, but that’s one area of books I still haven’t invested into.

I dunno, I guess it’s good to know these things but possibly not essential. It depends on your requirement - if you’re going to be grabbing/modifying existing jQuery plugins to build your stuff, then you only really need to learn jQuery (which is more like CSS than javascript) though a basic understand of DOM ancestry will be useful.

But if you plan on writing your own jQuery plugins then it certainly helps to know DOM (and probably javascript itself) but again perhaps not absolutely essential - as I said above, I’m no expert, certainly not in the ‘making your own plugins’ field.

So granted I give it a few reads and understand DOM scripting more in general, that I would be more fitted with jQuery?

I don’t see how you’re going to write code that alters the DOM in some way without knowing what you’re doing.

A Javascript library is only this: just a library to simplify writing code and to ease the many idiosyncracies of standard JS. It doesn’t replace knowing the concepts behind it 😊

Both books you list are excellent by the way!

On a designer level, there are hundreds of plugins for jQuery. No coding is necessary. Any code monkey should be able to plug in the necessary scripts to a page template, without understanding what the js is even doing behind the scenes. What’s impressive about the already written plugins, is what all you can do, with very little knowledge of the js intricacies, by simply stacking the plugin scripts you need in there and wiring up the CSS classes, ID’s etc.

Don’t get hung up on understanding things to try placing them in your designs, and flying by the seat of your pants. Some of the jQuery coders are straight up rocket scientists creating the code that is plug n’play.

Don’t get hung up on understanding things to try placing them in your designs, and flying by the seat of your pants. Some of the jQuery coders are straight up rocket scientists creating the code that is plug n’play.

Whilst yes there are loads of plugins available for jQuery (and other Javascript libraries) which are pretty much just drop in and they work it is still nice to understand what is going on under the hood so to speak because if something changes on your server which stops something from working and you have no idea how it works in the first place then you could have a pretty big fight on your hands getting it all back up and running again.

The way I feel is best to look at this is to create your site without any add-ons such as Javascript and ensure that you have a fully working compliant site without such technologies so that anyone visiting your site with these disabled can still get a good experience. After that you can then add in all the flashy Javascript and Flash technology for those that have them enabled.

This way you cater for everyone’s needs at no expense to one or the other. Then once your site is up and running and everyone is happy you can go back and look into how the plugins actually work so that you can have a really good understanding of what they are doing. Sometimes just understanding how something does work can give you ideas to getting the same effect or end result without using assisted technologies in the first place.

Just my two penneth worth though 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

I can go along with that Mark. Using javascripts to provide the added UI functionality is becoming somewhat of a mainstay in modern website design, look at the EE 2.0 preview and you’ll see evidence of some UI slickness 😊
It’s possible to go over the top with it and annoy some users who just want a plain old site experience, no scrollTo behavior for example, it’s a balancing act. Here’s a site to watch: http://jqueryfordesigners.com one of many webdesignerwall.com has some recent jQuery tutorials also.
-bleep out

Or http://www.ajaxrain.com or http://www.nettuts.com as a couple more.

I have a list of around 50 somewhere!! 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

Mark,
that list of links would be really useful. MMm… do you have a blog somewhere? I’m sure if you blogged about web development or EE you would have quite the following.

Me a following…

…hmmm not really sure if that’s a good thing or not? 😉

No blog at the moment but definitely in the working.

Mark