From the course: jQuery Essential Training

What is jQuery? - jQuery Tutorial

From the course: jQuery Essential Training

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What is jQuery?

- [Voiceover] So what exactly is jQuery? JQuery is one of the most popular, widely-used, open-source free JavaScript libraries on the web today. Using jQuery brings a whole host of benefits to your development work-flow. It greatly simplifies the tasks commonly involved with creating modern web applications that are highly interactive and responsive. Features like AJAX, dynamic content, rich animations, are all made easier by jQuery. JQuery works across all current modern browsers. And it abstracts away a lot of browser-specific features. This allows you to concentrate on the design and finished result that you're trying to achieve, rather than spending all your time trying to figure out how to build various effects and features that work well within individual browsers. Third, jQuery's code syntax is nice and compact. It allows you to write code that is a lot less verbose than using plain JavaScript. This results in code that is easier to read and maintain, even across large teams of people. If you look at the state of modern web-app development, several common patterns and scenarios start to emerge. Let's take a look at a few of those. One common pattern is that when the page loads, you have to perform some kind of state initialization, like maybe setting up a product list. Then you set up some event-handlers, and you kick off the application. Another common scenario is that the user performs some kind of action on the page, such as selecting an element. Then your app has to retrieve content from the page, perform some kind of manipulation on it, and then update the result back into the page. For example, an e-commerce site might update the contents of a shopping cart, in response to a user's action. A third common pattern is when your app has to fetch content from the server in order to update the page content. For example, a financial web app might periodically update stock quotes from a server, and then put the values back into the page. Now obviously there are more patterns than these three, but these are really good examples of common patterns that jQuery makes much easier to build. JQuery leverages many of the skills you already have as a web developer. For example, it uses CSS syntax to find and retrieve page content. It also uses JavaScript syntax, but is designed from the ground, up to work on sets of elements, not just individual ones. And you run into this all the time when you're building complex web apps. JQuery also uses a concept called statement chaining to reduce the amount of code you'll have to write, and we'll see that as we get into the course. JQuery is also highly extensible. There are a lot of plugins available for almost every web development need you might have. And in fact it's very easy to learn how to build your own plugins. Now we won't go into that here, in this course, since it's a little advanced, but you can do a Google search on jQuery plugins to get an idea of how many there are, and what they can do. Now that we've learned a little bit about what makes jQuery so great, let's jump into some code, and build our very first jQuery-enabled web page. When you're ready, we'll get into that in the next chapter.

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