Chapter 1, Designer, Meet jQuery, is an introduction to the jQuery library and JavaScript. You'll learn about jQuery's rise to fame, why it's so great for designers, and how it can help you create some fancy special effects without having to learn a lot of code. This chapter also includes a gentle and small introduction to JavaScript, and steps you through writing your first JavaScript code.

Chapter 2, Enhancing Links, walks you through some basic enhancements to links. You'll learn how to use jQuery to open a link in a new window, how to add icons to links, and how to turn a list of links into a tabbed interface.

Chapter 3, Making a Better FAQ Page, will introduce you to collapsing and showing content, as well as traversing an HTML document to move from one element to another. In this chapter, we'll set up a basic FAQ list, then work on progressively enhancing it to make it easier for our site visitors to use.

Chapter 4, Building Custom Scrollbars, is our first look at jQuery plugins. We'll use the jScrollPane plugin to create custom scrollbars that work as expected in several different browsers. We'll take a look at setting up scrollbars, customizing their appearance, and implementing animated scrolling behavior.

Chapter 5, Creating Custom Tooltips, takes a look at using the qTip plugin to replace the browser's default tooltips with custom tooltips. Then we take that a step further and create custom tooltips to enhance a navigation bar and use the tooltips to show extra content.

Chapter 6, Building an Interactive Navigation Menu, steps you through setting up fully functioning and visually stunning drop-down and fly-out menus. We step through the complex CSS required to get these types of menus working, use the Superfish plugin to fill in features missing from pure CSS solutions, and then take a look at customizing the appearance of the menus.

Chapter 7, Navigating Asynchronously, introduces Ajax and shows how to turn a simple website into a single page web app with a bit of jQuery. First, we set up a simple example, then step through a more full-featured example that includes support for incoming links and the back button.

Chapter 8, Showing Content in Lightboxes, will step you through showing photos and slideshows in a lightbox using the Colorbox jQuery plugin. Once we get the basics down, we'll also take a look at using the Colorbox plugin to create a fancy login, play a collection of videos, and even set up a single-page website gallery.

Chapter 9, Creating Slideshows, walks you through several different approaches to creating image slideshows. First, we step through a basic crossfade slideshow example built from scratch. Then we'll look at using the CrossSlide plugin, the Nivo Slider plugin, and the Galleriffic plugin to create different types of slideshows.

Chapter 10, Featuring Content in Carousels and Sliders, introduces carousels, news tickers, and sliders, all built with the help of the jCarousel jQuery plugin. We'll create a horizontal carousel, a vertical news ticker, and a featured content slider. Then, we'll take a look at how plugins can be extended even further when we integrate a slideshow to be used with a carousel.

Chapter 11, Creating an Interactive Data Grid, steps you through turning a simple HTML table into a fully-interactive data grid, allowing your site visitors to page through the table, search for entries, and sort by different columns.

Chapter 12, Improving Forms, takes a look at how forms can be improved. This chapter walks you through properly setting up an HTML form using some of the latest HTML5 form elements. Then we enhance the form by placing the cursor in the first field, using placeholder text, and validating the site visitor's form entries. Finally, we take a look at the Uniform jQuery plugin which allows us to style even the most stubborn and challenging form elements to achieve a consistent look for our forms across browsers.