Feature Prototyping with jQuery and Beginner's Introduction

A little something for everyone this month with two presentations, one for absolute jQuery beginners and one for jQuery developers with some experience working with jQuery.

Feature Prototyping with jQuery: Thinking from the Outside - In by Mike Edwards

HTML and CSS have come a long way in the last 10 years. www.csszengarden.com (http://www.csszengarden.com/) is a wonderful demonstration of how content and presentation can be almost completely decoupled in a modern website. The authors of a sites HTML provide hooks and attachment points for the CSS which is layered on top of the scaffolding provided.

jQuery enables a similar development style that enables layering features onto your site similar to how CSS layers styles. The CSS selector syntax embedded within jQuery allows the discovery, creation, and modification of arbitrary DOM elements, as well as the ability to attach event handlers on the fly. This enables packaging new features into stand-alone .js files that include the creation or discovery of Model data, rendering a View into or over the top of an existing page, and attaching Controller event handlers to existing or newly created page elements for interaction and feedback.

Compartmentalizing features like this can reduce code entanglement and increase the speed of iteration, especialy when developing prototypes for new or speculative UI features that can later be refactored and integrated into the existing code-base.

About Mike Edwards

Mike has a Master's in Computer Science and has been programming professionally since 2000. Most recently his work has focused on website performance optimization, data analysis, load testing, and highly responsive web interfaces. In the past he's worked in scripting and customization of SaaS applications, front and back-end web application development and maintenance, as well as data warehousing, analysis, and visualization. Familiar with numerous languages and technologies including C, C++, C# and Java, along with plenty of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, he's very interested in the deep and common themes that run throughout even seemingly diverse technologies. As a continuing education project he enjoys reading and thinking about data architecture, compilers/system software and programming language theory.

Beginner's Intro to jQuery, Part 1 by Natalie MacLees

This will be the first part of a beginner's introduction to jQuery aimed at absolute beginners. This series will continue throughout 2013. In this first part, we'll learn how to get set up to use jQuery in a project and learn about jQuery's ready() method.

About Natalie MacLees

In addition to being the founder and organizer of the jQuery LA meetup group, Natalie is a front-end web developer and UI designer and is founder + principal of the interactive agency, Purple Pen Productions. In 2012 she published jQuery for Designers with Packt Publishing. Together with Noel Saw she heads up the Southern California WordPress User’s Group, organizing WordPress meetups, help sessions, and workshops. In 2010, she worked as technical reviewer on WordPress 3 Complete by April Hodge Silver. She makes her online home at http://nataliemac.com .

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Cost

Thanks to our generous sponsor, this meetup will be free for everyone to attend.

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Our Sponsor, Q

Q is sponsoring a meetup space for us, and sponsoring food and drink. Please thank them for their generosity: @qconnects (http://twitter.com/qconnects)

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Parking and Location

Plentiful parking is available at the Howard Hughes Promenade across the street for a $2. Avoid the parking structure behind 6080 Center Drive - it's crazy expensive.