Setting up a development environment
We'll need a location to unpack the jQuery UI library in order to easily access the different parts of it within our own files. We should first create a project folder, into which all of our example files, as well as all of the library and other associated resources can be saved.
Create a new directory on your C: drive, or in your home directory, and call it jqueryui. This will be the root folder of our project and will be the location where we store all of the example files from the code download.
To unpack the library, open it in a compression program, such as the open source 7zip, and choose the extract or unzip command. When prompted for a location to unpack the archive to, choose the jqueryui folder that we just created.
The code examples that we'll be looking at use other resources, mostly images, but occasionally some PHP files too. The accompanying code download available on Packt's website contains all of the images that we'll be using. You should download this now if you can, visit: http://www.packtpub.com/support/book/user-interface-library-for-jquery. You'll need to create a new folder within the jqueryui project folder and call it img, then unpack all of the subdirectories within the img folder in the archive to this new folder.
The code download also contains all the examples files as well as the library itself. It would be incredibly easy to unpack the entire code download to a local directory and run each of the examples as they are.
These files are provided in the hope that they will be used for reference purposes only! I'd urge you to follow the examples in the book on the fly, manually creating each file as it is shown instead of just referring to the files in the code download. The best way to learn code is to code.
This is all we need to do, no additional platforms or applications need to be installed and nothing needs to be configured or set up. As long as you have a browser and some kind of code or text editor then everything is in place to begin developing with the library.
