jQuery Introduction

The purpose of jQuery is to make it much easier to use JavaScript on your website.

What You Should Already Know

Before you start studying jQuery, you should have a basic knowledge of:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript

If you want to study these subjects first, find the tutorials on our Home page.

What is jQuery?

jQuery is a lightweight, "write less, do more", JavaScript library.

The purpose of jQuery is to make it much easier to use JavaScript on your website.

jQuery takes a lot of common tasks that require many lines of JavaScript code to accomplish, and wraps them into methods that you can call with a single line of code.

jQuery also simplifies a lot of the complicated things from JavaScript, like AJAX calls and DOM manipulation.

The jQuery library contains the following features:

• HTML/DOM manipulation
• CSS manipulation
• HTML event methods
• Effects and animations
• AJAX
• Utilities

Tip: In addition, jQuery has plugins for almost any task out there.

Why jQuery?

There are lots of other JavaScript frameworks out there, but jQuery seems to be the most popular, and also the most extendable.

Many of the biggest companies on the Web use jQuery, such as:

• Google
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Netflix

	Will jQuery work in all browsers? The jQuery team knows all about cross-browser issues, and they have written this knowledge into the jQuery library. jQuery will run exactly the same in all major browsers, including Internet Explorer 6!