Conclusion

We’ve covered a great deal of material in this whirlwind introduction to jQuery. To summarize, it’s generally useful for any page that needs to perform anything but the most trivial of JavaScript operations. It’s also strongly focused on enabling page authors to employ the concept of unobtrusive JavaScript within their pages. With this approach, behavior is separated from structure in the same way that CSS separates style from structure, achieving better page organization and increased code versatility.

Despite the fact that jQuery introduces only two new names in the JavaScript namespace—the self-named jQuery function and its $ alias—the library provides a great deal of functionality by making that function highly versatile, adjusting the operation that it performs based on the parameters passed to it.

We mentioned how well the repository of the library and the code in general are organized. We also paid great attention to the several available versions of the library and their differences in order to be able to make a conscious choice. Performance is an important factor to consider, so we described the possibilities you have to reduce the added overhead to a minimum by including a library in your pages. Using CDNs and customizing the modules that you want are an amazing way to speed up the download of jQuery.

In the lessons that follow, we’ll explore all the features that jQuery has to offer you as a web developer. We’ll begin our tour in the next lesson as you learn how to use jQuery selectors to quickly and easily identify the elements that you wish to act on.