What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction and Overview, introduces you to what jQuery is, why you would want to use it, and why is it useful to combine it with PHP. Also, it gives a list of projects illustrating uses for combining PHP and jQuery.

Chapter 2, Quick Tricks, looks at a few quick examples on how to interface PHP and jQuery and a few tricks, which demonstrate how to relieve the most obvious resource wastes on the server.

Chapter 3, Tabs and Accordions, walks through the creation of tabs and accordions using the jQuery UI project, managing tabs and accordions using a rich text editor and a bit of PHP, and using Ajax to populate your accordion and tab panels.

Chapter 4, Forms and Form Validation, explores form validation using jQuery and PHP and how to use the same PHP configuration to validate on both sides—the server and the client side. It also covers examples on optimization of large select boxes and building auto-suggest fields.

Chapter 5, File Management, teaches you to manage almost everything—creating, uploading, editing, moving, downloading, and deleting files and directories.

Chapter 6, Calendars, builds a weekly calendar for you, which has events that can be created, edited, moved around, and deleted. It also takes care of recurring events.

Chapter 7, Image Manipulation, discusses methods for manipulating images with jQuery and PHP, along with some ways to make the changes non-destructive, so that multiple manipulations, such as select, rotate, resize, and crop, can be made on the same image.

Chapter 8, Drag and Drop, demonstrates a few uses of drag and drop, including sorting lists, dragging between lists, and hierarchical sorting, which can be used to improve the usability of your content management system.

Chapter 9, Data Tables, builds a very large data table and discusses how to navigate, sort, search, paginate, and search it using jQuery and Ajax.

Chapter 10, Optimization, shows the ways to optimize jQuery and various other elements of the web development environment.