Happy New Year - JQuery Learning

Just wanted to wish everyone a happy new year. New year new beginings.

Over the last couple of months I have been trying to learn the jQuery framework, along with javascript. I last touched javascript back in the early days, I guess you can call it early days, in around 2001. But at that stage the use of javascript was quite limited. When I had a look at some of the examples, it certainly did look like something that was good, but with a client side calculator and some odd client side manipulation etc... it wasn't very appetizing.

So what has changed in since then ? Well the main item that has come on to the seen which has really shaken the world is AJAX. Based on this client / server programming has taken a step forward on the web, and this is why I'm looking into jQuery.

jQuery is a framework, and it is not a new language - underneath the hood is javascript. However, the power of the framework is how it makes complex tasks really simple. I wont provide an example here, purely because there are plenty of examples on the web. What this means is that the common tasks which are in the framework will generally be cached on your visitors computer. Hence the load time for the page is significantly reduced, also the complex tasks of browser compatibility and coding problems of browsers has been taken out of the hands of coder. Instead the framework takes care of all of this.

If you want more information on this please go http://www.jquery.com, for a newbie to this world I have to say that I struggled to get into the context of jquery and at times I felt it would have been easier if I had just used .getElementByID instead of the selector. But overtime I started to enjoy the selection power that jquery offered.

Apart from www.jquery.com I stumbled upon http://jqfundamentals.com/book/book.html#N20057 which really explained everything.


I hope this has helped someone get into the jquery world.