JQuery Tutorial

jQuery is a programming language you can use to create cool web applications. It’s free, powerful, relatively easy to set up and learn, and it has extensions and plugins available to do almost anything you could imagine. You can get started quickly, and you won’t outgrow it later when you get really good at it.

The most basic concept you need to grasp is that a web page is just a bunch of text, organized in a certain way, which is displayed by a browser. The browser reads this text and builds a model of the page in memory called the ‘document object model’. jQuery lets you manipulate the document object model (also commonly known as the ‘DOM’).

jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library with the tagline of "write less, do more". So what does that mean, exactly?

To understand what it means, it helps to have an idea of what jQuery is intended to help you do. If you didn’t have jQuery (or any other framework like Dojo, which is also very cool) then the way you would make things happen in the browser is to use a language called JavaScript.

JavaScript is programming language that is built into all modern web browsers so that client-side scripts can interact with the user, control the browser, communicate with the server in the background, and alter the document content and formatting that is displayed. JavaScript is a full-featured programming language and, as such, it can be rather complicated.

jQuery templates separate structure and data, making the application easier to code, test, and maintain as shown below.

JQUERY VS JAVASCRIPT

jQuery is written in JavaScript. In fact, jQuery is a lot of JavaScript all in one place– hence the phrase ‘library’. It’s like a library full of JavaScript code. The purpose of jQuery is to make it easier for you to use JavaScript in your web pages. jQuery takes many of the common tasks that would otherwise require lots of lines of JavaScript code and turns them into methods that you can call with a single line of code. But of course, when your "one line" of code is executed, what reallyhappens inside the browser is that all the code in the jQuery library is executed in its place. That’s what jQuery saves you from — writing all the JavaScript that is ‘under the hood’.

jQuery is a language that converts your one line of simple code into dozens and possibly even hundreds of lines of complex JavaScript code. It does this automatically and nearly instantaneously. In fact, that is the whole point of jQuery.

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

The jQuery library contains the following core features:

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

Lianamelissa is Research Analyst at Mindmajix. A techno freak who likes to explore different technologies. Likes to follow the technology trends in market and write about them.