Web Designers Guide To jQuery

jQuery is a lightweight Javascript library that makes it simple to create great looking web effects using a few lines of code. The code is similar to CSS when it comes to selecting elements and their descendents & jQuery will separate the behaviour just like how CSS separates the design from HTML. jQuery also provides many useful features which can be used in any browser making it very versatile.

jQuery allows you to turn ten lines of code into two and combine a massive range of features with cross browser compatibility to end up with a very robust framework.

Advantages Of jQuery:

Very easy to learn especially if you are familiar with Javascript and CSS.
Reduces the amount of code to be written compared to standard Javascript, which leads better coding and faster development times.
Wide range of plugins and extensions available from the jQuery development community.
Very well organised documentation and a very active community to help users.

Key Features:

DOM Element Selectors:

jQuery lets you select DOM elements which can have functionality applied to them with operational methods. jQuery uses CSS 3.0 syntax to select multiple or single elements in documents.

Simplified Event Handling:

jQuery provides a simple method for binding or unbinding event and a normalized event model which makes it easy to handle events and hook up result handlers for compatible browsers.

Easy Plugin Extensibility:

jQuery provides a simple plugin API which has allowed developers to create hundreds of plugins to use on websites to perform many functions. This simple plugin is why jQuery has become so popular in such a short time.

Getting Started With jQuery:

You can download jQuery by visiting the official site here to download the files you need and view the documentation.

Here are a few sites with tutorials to get you started with jQuery:

jQuery For Designers

Learning jQuery

Hopefully this article has given you an idea of the power of jQuery and how it can benefit you and your websites.

I’ve been interested in web design for a while and I went to university to study a degree in media and graphics. While at university I developed my design skills using Adobe Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver and Adobe After Effects.

Visit Authors Website

Tags: jQuery, Web Design

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Colin Says:
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:28 pm

Not much of a guide. Seems like more of a chapter summary for the first chapter that would be a guide or even a table of contents of a guide but certainly not a guide.

Oliver Says:
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:07 am

Thank you for your comment Colin.

This is more of an overview of jQuery and a beginners guide to getting started with it.