Introducing the jQuery JavaScript Library

As you know, a modern web site is comprised of three different layers, which come in useful for defining its structure, its visual presentation, and the appropriate behavior. Creating the first two modules of this multi-layered schema can be tackled by a web designer with relative ease; it requires defining the web site's structural markup and the CSS styles associated with it. But things can get more complicated when implementing the behavior of certain web page elements.

Of course, this process implies developing unobtrusive JavaScript applications that must be tied to the structural markup of the web site in question. From a web designer's point of view, this could be a challenging and annoying task.

Certainly, to facilitate the development of a fully-featured client-side application, a web designer can pick up a third-party JavaScript library, such as Prototype, Ext JS, or Mojo, which are all good and permit the user to write complex JavaScript programs without having to "reinvent the wheel." However, it's fair to say that many of these frameworks provide an application programming interface that can be pretty intimidating, particularly for those who only need to deal with plain HTML and CSS code.

In light of this, a new contender has been incorporated into the long list of JavaScript frameworks available nowadays on the web, called "jQuery" (for more information, visit http://jquery.com/). It allows users to develop client-side applications very rapidly by means of a friendly syntax.

In this article series, I'll attempt to provide you with a concise yet illustrative guide to using the main methods that come bundled with the "jQuery" JavaScript library to perform the most common tasks required by JavaScript programs. These include navigating a web page's DOM, manipulating CSS styles dynamically, working with Ajax, and so forth.

Hopefully, by the end of this series, you'll be armed with a solid background on using the principal features provided by the "jQuery" package. Therefore, with the preliminaries out of our way, let's begin this educational journey now!