jQuery is everywhere: virtually every site uses it and over the years this library has become more or less indispensable. Some of the most commonly used features of jQuery include selections, inserting and manipulating existing content and DOM elements, creating event listeners, and working with CSS. But jQuery is much more than a simple DOM manipulation library. You can create animated effects, integrate AJAX, and even extend jQuery's core set of features to build your own tools and functions.
Animation on a website can range anywhere from user interface effects to full blown interactive sequences that tell a story. jQuery is not the best performance-driven animation solution, but it certainly is one of the most easy to use. With jQuery, you can animate an element's visibility, CSS properties, create sequenced effects, and much more. And if you use the 1.X version, or the upcoming 3.0 compact version of jQuery, then animation effects can also be deployed on older versions of Internet Explorer where CSS3-based animation effects are not supported.
jQuery also allows you to incorporate AJAX on your web sites. AJAX is a collective term to define technologies that cohesively work together and allow to send and receive data in the background in an asynchronous fashion. Basically this means updating portions of the page without reloading the entire thing, and it's something that we see on all sites from Facebook to GMail.
You can take jQuery and its amazing set of features to new heights by using thousands of plugins that developers have made available to you. Developers have thus built plugins for photo slideshows, carousels, modal dialogs, date and time, audio/video, tables, charts, graphs, navigation, form validation, animation and many more. Of course you can easily write your own plugin as well.
In this course, we leap forward from selectors and basic DOM manipulation techniques and go beyond the basics.
- Our first stop will be animation. In this lesson, we'll explore jQuery's animation methods, and we'll learn how to animate an element's visibility, position, and other attributes. We'll also built practical examples that will help you understand key concepts and techniques that are handy when creating a dynamic user experience.
- Our next stop will allow us to deep dive into AJAX with jQuery. We'll go hands-on with jQuery's AJAX methods that allow us to send and fetch data and also allows us to interact with third-party API providers for integrating amazing services and features into your app.
- Our final stop will be to explore the world of jQuery plugins. We'll have a look at four types of commonly used plugins and you'll also get to write your very own jQuery plugin.
#What's next?
View all handouts for the course jQuery: Beyond the Basics on Lesson 1.1