jQuery Overview

Effects

The effects category of jQuery methods works in a similar way to the animation components of other libraries, and allows you to show, or hide, slide down or up fade elements in and out in an attractive and graceful manner. You are also given the tools to easily define and work with your very own custom effects.

AJAX

With AJAX being instrumental in the release of the first JavaScript libraries, it's no surprise to find comprehensive AJAX support in the jQuery library. It provides built-in methods for loading remote pages, remote data and remote scripts using either get or post requests, as well as giving you easy access to JSON data.

A series of custom AJAX events are also defined here, providing a quick and efficient way to work with success, complete, start, stop and error events.

Utilities

The utilities section provides a mixed bag of random but useful methods, such as determining the browser in use and whether the box model is supported, trimming whitespace, and working with objects and arrays.

UI

Separate from the main library, but still flying the jQuery banner is jQuery UI, a sister library chock full of user interface widgets and interaction helpers. This extension of jQuery provides tools to enable the rapid development of interactive and engaging front-ends. The UI library is still very much a work in progress, with many additional widgets planned for future releases, but even now it's a highly usable addition to the jQuery family.

Summary

jQuery is easily one of the best JavaScript libraries currently available and is suited to developers of all classes, from beginner to ninja. It's ridiculously easy to use, but still packs a powerful punch and can help to drastically reduce your code footprint. If there is only one JavaScript library that you ever use, it should without doubt be jQuery.