Part 1. Meet jQuery UI

These first two chapters serve as an introduction to jQuery UI. As you’ll learn in chapter 1, jQuery UI is a collection of plugins and utilities that build on jQuery, supported by the jQuery Foundation. You can count on them to be officially supported and maintained throughout the life of your application.

In chapter 1 you’ll learn about the library itself—what’s in it, who maintains it, what it does well, and even what it doesn’t do well.

In chapter 2 you’ll build on that knowledge to learn the ins and outs of widgets, the core building blocks of jQuery UI. The focus here is on three mechanisms the widget factory provides for customization: options, methods, and events. Options are configurable properties of widgets, methods let you perform actions on widgets, and events let you to respond to changes on the widgets.

What you learn about the library, and about the jQuery UI widgets, will give you the foundation you need to build more complex interfaces in part 2.