Pinning control synchronization of complex networks is a fascinating and hot issue in the field of nonlinear science. However, the existing works are all based on a continuous-time feedback control strategy and assume that each network node can have continuous access to the states of its neighbors. This brief presents a novel distributed event-triggered mechanism for pinning control synchronization of complex networks. The control of nodes is only triggered at their own event time, which effectively reduces the frequency of controller updates compared with continuous-time feedback control. Considering limited communication, the new approach successfully avoids the continuous communication used for calculating the error thresholds in the event-triggered mechanism. In addition, we also develop a new alternative iterative algorithm that can further reduce the consumption of computing and communication resources to some extent. Finally, simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and illustrate the correctness of the theoretical results.