JQuery Introduction

 

jQuery is a JavaScript Library.

jQuery greatly simplifies JavaScript programming.

jQuery is easy to learn.

What is jQuery?

jQuery is a lightweight, "write less, do more", JavaScript library.

The purpose of jQuery is to make it much easier to use JavaScript on your website.

jQuery takes a lot of common tasks that require many lines of JavaScript code to accomplish, and wraps them into methods that you can call with a single line of code.

jQuery also simplifies a lot of the complicated things from JavaScript, like AJAX calls and DOM manipulation.

The jQuery library contains the following features:

• HTML/DOM manipulation
• CSS manipulation
• HTML event methods
• Effects and animations
• AJAX
• Utilities

Why jQuery?

There are lots of other JavaScript libraries out there, but jQuery is probably the most popular, and also the most extendable.

Many of the biggest companies on the Web use jQuery, such as:

• Google
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Netflix

Adding jQuery to Your Web Pages

There are several ways to start using jQuery on your web site. You can:

• Download the jQuery library from jQuery.com
• Include jQuery from a CDN, like Google

One big advantage of using the hosted jQuery from Google:

Many users already have downloaded jQuery from Google when visiting another site. As a result, it will be loaded from cache when they visit your site, which leads to faster loading time. Also, most CDN's will make sure that once a user requests a file from it, it will be served from the server closest to them, which also leads to faster loading time.