JQuery

A library that makes JavaScript easier to use.

JQuery is a library of useful JavaScript objects and methods that makes it easier to work with the elements that make up a web page.

That’s a plain english way of saying that JQuery provides a set of objects and methods for working with the Document Object Model (DOM). The DOM is nothing more than a standard set of objects (with methods and attributes) that describe all of the HTML elements in a web page.

There are many ways of working with the DOM from a variety of programming languages. JQuery is one of the mostly commonly used ways of accessing the DOM from JavaScript code.

In JQuery, almost everything you do is accessed through a single function that has the name $. That’s right, “dollar sign” is the name of the function. You call it like this:

   $();

However, that’s a stupid way of calling it, because you aren’t passing in anything as a parameter, and you aren’t doing anything with the returned value. Far more common is something like this:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("#theButton").click( function(){
    var contents = $("#theTextArea").val();
    var howManyLines = countNewLines(contents);
    $("#theResultsGoHere").html(
      "<p>There are " + howManyLines + " lines</p>"
    ); // end of html function 
  }); // this ends the call to the .click function
}); // this ends the call to the .ready function

For an explanation of that example, see: http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~pconrad/cs130e/examples/jquery/gettingStarted/

Use “view source” in a web browser to look at the source of the web page. You’ll find the JavaScript code inside one of the <script> tags.

References

Simple examples