What is jQuery
jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library. It makes things like HTML document traversal and manipulation, event handling, animation, and Ajax much simpler with an easy-to-use API that works across a multitude of browsers.
jQuery makes a web developer's life easy. It provides many built-in functions using which you can accomplish various tasks easily and quickly.
jQuery Important Features
- DOM Selection: jQuery provides Selectors to retrieve DOM element based on different criteria like tag name, id, css class name, attribute name, value, nth child in hierarchy etc.
- DOM Manipulation: You can manipulate DOM elements using various built-in jQuery functions. For example, adding or removing elements, modifying html content, css class etc.
- Special Effects: You can apply special effects to DOM elements like show or hide elements, fade-in or fade-out of visibility, sliding effect, animation etc.
- Events: jQuery library includes functions which are equivalent to DOM events like click, dblclick, mouseenter, mouseleave, blur, keyup, keydown etc. These functions automatically handle cross-browser issues.
- Ajax: jQuery also includes easy to use AJAX functions to load data from servers without reloading whole page.
- Cross-browser support: jQuery library automatically handles cross-browser issues, so the user does not have to worry about it. jQuery supports IE 6.0+, FF 2.0+, Safari 3.0+, Chrome and Opera 9.0+.
Advantages of jQuery
- Easy to learn: jQuery is easy to learn because it supports same JavaScript style coding.
- Write less do more: jQuery provides a rich set of features that increase developers' productivity by writing less and readable code.
- Excellent API Documentation: jQuery provides excellent online API documentation.
- Cross-browser support: jQuery provides excellent cross-browser support without writing extra code.
- Unobtrusive: jQuery is unobtrusive which allows separation of concerns by separating html and jQuery code.
Learn how to download and install jQuery library in the next section.