Beginning JavaScript® and CSS Development with jQuery

Introduction

The jQuery JavaScript framework is a rising star in the world of web development. JavaScript frameworks in general have grown to become immensely popular in the past few years in parallel with the ever-increasing presence of JavaScript-driven, so-called Web 2.0 websites that make heavy use of technologies like AJAX and JavaScript in general for slick graphical enhancements that would be impossible or much more cumbersome to incorporate without JavaScript.

jQuery's mission as a JavaScript library is simple — it strives to make the lives of web developers easier by patching over certain portions of cross-browser development and by making other tasks commonly needed by developers much easier. jQuery has the real, proven ability to reduce many lines of plain-vanilla JavaScript to just a few lines, and, in many cases, just a single line. jQuery strives to remove barriers to JavaScript development by removing redundancy wherever possible and normalizing cross-browser JavaScript development in key areas where browsers would otherwise differ, such as Microsoft's Event API and the W3C Event API, and other, more remedial tasks like getting the mouse cursor's position when an event has taken place.

jQuery is a compact, lightweight library that currently works in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser from version 6 on, Firefox from version 1.5 on, Safari from version 2.0.2 on, Opera from version 9 on, and Google's new Chrome browser from version 0.2 on. Getting started with jQuery ...