What this book covers

Chapter 1, Handling Events with jQuery, helps you understand jQuery's cross-browser event handling methods. You will learn to work with keyboard and mouse events. Advance event handling topics, such as dragging and keyboard shortcuts are also discussed.

Chapter 2, Combining PHP and jQuery, lists several ways of sending AJAX requests using jQuery and also describes how PHP responds to such requests. This chapter also contains recipes that deal with caching of AJAX requests and error handling during AJAX requests.

Chapter 3, Working with XML Documents, explains working with XML files in PHP as well as jQuery. Recipes will describe how to read, write, and modify XMLs using DOM and SimpleXML extensions of PHP. Parsing XML with jQuery is also discussed.

Chapter 4, Working with JSON, discusses JSON in detail. You will be shown how to read and write JSON data in PHP, and also explore jQuery's inbuilt capabilities of parsing JSON.

Chapter 5, Working with Forms, deals with forms and form validations. You will learn how to validate forms for different types of data with jQuery. This will cover validating empty fields, numbers, e-mail addresses, web addresses, and much more. Server-side validation methods will also be discussed to make validations more powerful.

Chapter 6, Adding Visual Effects to Forms, extends the previous chapter and provides recipes for adding visual effects to forms. Recipes in this chapter allow you to create user-friendly forms by adding effects, such as highlighting, fading, expandable boxes, and various others.

Chapter 7, Creating Cool Navigation Menus, describes the creation of different types of menus, such as animated menus, accordions, and tabbed menus. Advanced techniques for creating tabs are also covered that will guide you in adding and removing tabs on the fly.

Chapter 8, Data Binding with PHP and jQuery, explains, in detail, how a database can be used along with PHP and jQuery. Examples included in this chapter will explain how to fetch data from the database and use it in web forms.

Chapter 9, Enhancing your Site with PHP and jQuery, teaches you some advanced techniques of PHP and jQuery. It will show how to overcome browser restrictions like cross-domain requests. You will learn to create a jQuery plugin for custom use and an endless scrolling page among other things.

Appendix, Firebug, explains the use of Firebug for debugging HTML and JavaScript in web pages. You will learn how to edit HTML and change the appearance of pages on the browser itself without switching to actual code files. You will be able to execute JavaScript directly from Firebug and further understand debugging JavaScript using this add-on.