Professional jQuery

INTRODUCTION

OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS JAVASCRIPT has undergone a remarkable transformation. Where once it was a “toy” language relegated to secondary status it’s now one of the most important programming languages in the world. With the ongoing importance of Ajax-based development and the rise of full-featured JavaScript libraries, the stigma surrounding JavaScript has all but vanished. As easily the most popular and beginner-friendly library, jQuery is responsible for the lion’s share of that progress.

jQuery is more than just a beginner’s choice; however, it’s in use at some of the largest organizations in the world, adding interactivity to billions of page views every month. Amazon, IBM, Twitter, NBC, Best Buy and Dell are just a few of the companies using jQuery in production.

With a web-scale footprint it should come as no surprise that jQuery is evolving at web speed. 2011 saw no less than three major releases and the community surrounding jQuery continues to blossom as developers the world over contribute bug fixes, plugins and work on related projects like jQuery UI and QUnit. This flurry of activity ensures that jQuery presents a full-featured option for any developer looking to do world-class JavaScript development.

This is true no matter what programming philosophy or technique is followed: jQuery is prominently featured in the front end of Java/Spring, PHP, .NET, Ruby on Rails, and Python/Django stacks all over the Web.

If you have experience with HTML, CSS, and ...