As Web designers, you are painstakingly compelled to grab Web surfers’ attention as quickly as possible and then keep them on your site to absorb the content. In addition to the product, service, or information that you are providing, the site must be visually attractive and offer stimulating (and valuable) interaction. The jQuery library is the main ingredient for providing the icing on your Web-site cake. If applied well, the effects of jQuery will convince visitors and application users to click around and sample all of your content.

The trick is learning how to combine jQuery with other markup and languages effectively. You must gain knowledge in a wide range of disciplines, like HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), to know how to properly mix in the right amount of jQuery. The goal of this book is to give you the knowledge to bring the HTML, CSS, and jQuery ingredients together to create compelling interactivity to your Web sites and applications.

Throughout the book, I’ll also show you ways to use PHP, a popular serverside scripting language, and MySQL, a relational database product, to enhance your overall development and supercharge your applications. Both technologies translate easily to other Web development languages.

Applied jQuery teaches readers how to quickly start writing application interfaces. The beautifully designed book offers practical techniques and provides lots of real-world advice and guidance. The Author, Jay Blanchard, has practical experience working in the field and wastes no time getting to the instruction, taking the reader from a beginner to a proficient interface programmer by the end of the book. Today's Web developers are are expected to be well versed in many different technologies. While it is good to have a shelf full of books that focus on single technologies, having a book that shows developers how to combine these technologies is key. This book takes the reader beyond the fundamental mechanics of individual technologies to illustrate the value and power of combining jQuery and PHP with templates and layouts handled by HTML and CSS. Beginning to intermediate web developers designing and developing web application interfaces and web sites will learn how to blend these ingredient technologies, as well as how to secure jQuery.