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Beginning JavaScript and CSS Development with jQuery

Introduction

The jQuery JavaScript framework is a rising star in the world of web development. JavaScript frameworks in general have grown to become immensely popular in the past few years in parallel with the ever-increasing presence of JavaScript-driven, so-called Web 2.0 websites that make heavy use of technologies like AJAX and JavaScript in general for slick graphical enhancements that would be impossible or much more cumbersome to incorporate without JavaScript.

jQuery’s mission as a JavaScript library is simple — it strives to make the lives of web developers easier by patching over certain portions of cross-browser development and by making other tasks commonly needed by developers much easier. jQuery has the real, proven ability to reduce many lines of plain-vanilla JavaScript to just a few lines, and, in many cases, just a single line. jQuery strives to remove barriers to JavaScript development by removing redundancy wherever possible and normalizing cross-browser JavaScript development in key areas where browsers would otherwise differ, such as Microsoft’s Event API and the W3C Event API, and other, more remedial tasks like getting the mouse cursor’s position when an event has taken place.

jQuery is a compact, lightweight library that currently works in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser from version 6 on, Firefox from version 1.5 on, Safari from version 2.0.2 on, Opera from version 9 on, and Google’s new Chrome browser from version 0.2 on. Getting started with jQuery is very easy — all you have to do is include a single link of markup in your HTML or XHTML documents that includes the library. Throughout this book, I demonstrate jQuery’s API (Application Programming Interface) components in detail and show you how all the nuts and bolts of this framework come together to enable you to rapidly develop client-side applications.

I also cover the jQuery UI library, which makes redundant user-interface (UI) tasks on the client side ridiculously easy and accessible to everyday web developers who might not have much JavaScript programming expertise. Have you ever wanted to create an animated accordion effect like the one found on Apple’s Mac home page at www.apple.com/mac? With jQuery, not only can you create this effect with your own look and feel, but also it’s dead simple to boot.

The jQuery framework itself has enjoyed a great deal of mainstream exposure. It has been used by Google, Dell, Digg, NBC, CBS, Netflix, The Mozilla Foundation, and the popular WordPress and Drupal PHP frameworks.

jQuery is fast — superfast — and it has a small footprint. It’s only 15 KB, using the compressed and gzipped version.

jQuery gives you the ability to provide complex, professional, visually driven user interfaces and effects with very few lines of code. What may have taken other developers days or even weeks to accomplish can be done with jQuery in just a few hours.