Beginning jQuery

CHAPTER 2

The Basics of jQuery

jQuery is a powerful and complex library that was first released in August 2006, although the initial idea came much earlier. Before diving in, there’s time for a very brief history lesson on how the library came to be.

The first time anything posted online that hinted that a potential library was forming was on August 22, 2005. jQuery’s founder, John Resig, posted a blog post titled “Selectors in JavaScript” (http://ejohn.org/blog/selectors-in-javascript/), which demonstrated Resig’s idea that we could interact with elements in JavaScript using CSS selectors. This demonstrated a new idea that would eventually form ...