Having a hard time customizing

alexandervj

I'm new to datatables but love the plugin and plan to use this for all my future sites. I'm having a hard time customizing though and not sure what I need to know to be able to fully cutomize datatables easily. I'm obviously comfortable with html and css but dont have too much knowledge of Javascript and JQuery. Do I need to learn Javascript and JQuery to really get the most from datatables? Thanks

user345

Hello alexander,

You do not really need to learn about JavaScript to use DataTables as JS is a pretty wide language and learning all of it would be greatly impossible. You only need to know how to call the libraries in your header and how to use scripts. Follow the tutorials up in here and you will learn JavaScript by working with DataTables anyway.

To get started you would want to know how you would process and retrieve the data for your table:

• from a server-side (external database like mysql or phpmyadmin, for instance)
  or
• straight from the client-side (the data is directly held on a regular HTML table).

Once you know how to retrieve the data, everything gets clearer.

To style your table the easy way look here: http://datatables.net/manual/styling/

Ps.: Programmation and web development are concepts that are better acquired through practice. Meaning, you only need to learn what you need to learn.

Hope it helps