jQuery secret weapon #3: Events and effects (aka: the icing on the cake)

All right, you are a selection master; you can grab anything you want from anyone's CSS and WordPress theme and you can manipulate those selections' CSS properties and attributes until the cows come home. Just from these first examples, you've probably managed to come up with your very own impressive jQuery enhancements. But wait, there's more! Let's bring it all together with events and effects.

Working with events

There are lots of events that you can handle with jQuery. You can manually bind and unbind events to elements, you can reference the unified event object, and you can use event helpers. We're going to save looking at the jQuery's unified event object until a little later in this book and for now, take a look at the most direct ways to get started with events.

Helpers are so helpful!

The helper functions, also often referred to as "shortcuts", let you easily set up events on a click or hover. You can also...