What is jQuery?

What is jQuery?

jQuery is a lightweight, "WRITE LESS, DO MORE", JavaScript library.

The purpose of jQuery is to make it much easier to use JavaScript on your website.

jQuery takes a lot of common tasks that requires many lines of JavaScript code to accomplish, and
wraps it

into methods that you can call with a single line of code.

 To use jQuery, you need to include it on the pages where you wish to take advantage of it. You can do this

 by downloading jQuery from their website at www.jquery.com. There is usually a choice between a

"Production" version and a "Development" version. The first is for your live website, because it has been

minified and compressed to take up the least amount of space, which is important for your visitors, whose

browser will have to download the jQuery file along with the rest of your website. For testing and

development, the "Development" version is best. It hasn't been minified or compressed, so when you run

into an error, you can actually see where in jQuery it happens.

jQuery also simplifies a lot of the complicated things from JavaScript, like AJAX calls and DOM

 manipulation.

The jQuery library contains the following features:

• HTML/DOM manipulation
• CSS manipulation
• HTML event methods
• Effects and animations
• AJAX
• Utilities