I first played with jQuery a month or so ago but it hasn’t been until recently that I’ve had a need to actually start using it in my applications. Since it was time to get reacquainted with the tool I thought I’d write a brief tutorial aimed at helping those unfamiliar with the jQuery JavaScript library.

What Is jQuery?
jQuery.com says it well…

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

Let’s Get Started
Enough mumbo-jumbo, let’s jump into things. First of all, you’ll need to download the latest jQuery compressed library from http://jquery.com/src/jquery-latest.pack.js and save it locally so you can reference it within your head tag similar to this:

<script src="your/path/jquery.js"></script>

Just about everything that we would want to do with jQuery will manipulate the Document Object Module (DOM). If we try to touch the DOM before it’s appropriately loaded we’ll get some messy errors. To avoid that, the first Read More »