I'm picking up jQuery and jQuery UI and I would like some suggestions on some practice exercises for learning the libraries.
I'm particularly interested in Ajax and anything that might be a little bit .net centric.
I acknowledge that the jQuery web site has lots of simple examples showing how to use all the individual function calls, but I'm interested in seeing how they work with more practical examples.
Games are always fun. I wrote a chess game to learn jQuery AJAX programming, which was complicated but cool. If you're looking for something simpler, perhaps Tic-Tac-Toe would be a good choice.
Rading jquery official documentation, tutorials as well as deploying your own code, just start low and go slow, after all the bugs and doubts, tons of google searches and SO browsing you will be a guru. I think it is the best way, probably not the most productive. AS someone said: the expert is one who had a lot of errors on the way and learnt from them.
So start coding now! If you want ajax: search for getJSON() function first, I think it is the best step to start learing client-server interaction.
PS: also some good javascript book is also good for you, whiule jquery allow a big deal of abstraction it is still based on javascript.
If you still want some links, here we go: Getting started with jquery Jquery for beginners
A good way to pickup jQuery and AJAX is to just build websites. Setup a local web server with MAMP/WAMP/XAMPP and just start building / designing whatever kind of pages you want to.
If you're short on design inspiration, try to reverse engineer existing websites / web apps without looking at source code.
Something simple I used to do with dynamic code generation was to make an etch-a-sketch type page..
Make an X by X grid of pixel-like blocks, and give them all a hover effect of changing their color.. maybe change it each time it's hovered to something else.. play around with that concept a bit and add enhancements and features..