jQuery Cookbook

Chapter 5. Faster, Simpler, More Fun

Michael Geary

Scott González

Introduction

Nearly every day, someone asks on the jQuery Google Group how they can make their code simpler or faster, or how to debug a piece of code that isn’t working.

This chapter will help you simplify your jQuery code, making it easier to read and more fun to work on. And we’ll share some tips for finding and fixing those bugs.

We’ll also help you make your code run faster, and equally important, find out which parts of your code you need to speed up. So your site’s visitors will have more fun using the snappy pages on your site.

That’s what we call a win-win situation. Happy coding!

5.1. That’s Not jQuery, It’s JavaScript!

Problem

You’re a web designer who is new to jQuery, and you’re having trouble with the syntax of an if/else statement. You know it must be a simple problem, and before asking on the jQuery mailing list, you do your homework: you search the jQuery documentation and find nothing. Web searches for terms like jquery if else statement aren’t proving helpful either.

You also need to split an email address into two parts, separating it at the @ sign. You’ve heard that there is a function to split strings, but there doesn’t seem to be any information in the jQuery documentation about this either.

Is jQuery really that poorly documented?

Solution

The if/else statement and the .split() method for strings are part of JavaScript, not part of jQuery.

So, these web searches will turn up more useful results:

javascript ...