From the course: jQuery for Web Designers

jQuery is a JavaScript library - jQuery Tutorial

From the course: jQuery for Web Designers

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jQuery is a JavaScript library

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- [Voiceover] Let's answer one fundamental question first. What is jQuery? jQuery is a JavaScript library. Well, that was easy. What does it actually mean? jQuery, like all JavaScript libraries, adds onto JavaScript. JavaScript has lots of built-in objects and functions. Things like window and document that we see all the time. Then utility classes like math and array. These objects contain functions that you'll use all the time when you're doing arithmetic or when you're working with the array data type. You also have global functions like isNAN() or parseFloat(). When you install jQuery, you end up with another object. It's called jQuery and it's also alias to as the dollar sign, and it's just another top level object that we can work with. So, having added jQuery onto your JavaScript environment, what do you actually get? You get a collection of JavaScript functions. jQuery's main purpose is to select DOM elements. It's called jQuery as a shortening of JavaScript Query. You're sort of querying your DOM, getting back a series of elements, and then you can do stuff to them. This is an extension of JavaScript's core capabilities. Most of the things that you do with jQuery you could do without it just using JavaScript without adding on this additional library. It just makes them a lot easier to do. jQuery also works in all modern browsers and, if you're using an older version of jQuery, you can work with older browsers as well. So, to recap, jQuery is a JavaScript library that adds on an object with a whole bunch of useful functions.

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