What is jQuery? What Benefits Do I get by Using it?

11:11 AM Unknown 2 Comments


jQuery is free, open source software, licensed under the MIT License. jQuery's syntax is designed to make it easier to navigate a document, select DOM elements, create animations, handle events, and develop Ajax applications. jQuery also provides capabilities for developers to create plug-ins on top of the JavaScript library. This enables developers to create abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, theme-able widgets. The modular approach to the jQuery library allows the creation of powerful dynamic web pages and web applications.
The purpose of jQuery is to make it much easier to use JavaScript on your website.
Before you start studying jQuery, you should have a basic knowledge of:
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript

The jQuery library contains the following features:
  • HTML/DOM manipulation
  • CSS manipulation
  • HTML event methods
  • Effects and animations
  • AJAX
  • Utilities

jQuery is very compact and well written JavaScript code that increases the productivity of the developer by enabling them to achieve critical UI functionality by writing very small amount of code. The following are some of its widely known and used features/functionalities
  • It helps to improve the performance of the application
  • It helps to develop most browser compatible web page
  • It helps to implement UI related critical functionality without writing hundreds of lines of codes
  • It is fast
  • It is extensible – jQuery can be extended to implement customized behavior

Other advantages of jQuery are:
  • No need to learn fresh new syntaxes to use jQuery, knowing simple JavaScript syntax is enough
  • Simple and cleaner code, no need to write several lines of codes to achieve complex functionality

Where to begin learning jQuery???
I have found the following sources very good for beginning jQuery:

I hope you will find this post helpful and please add more to it!




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