jQuery Tutorial - 1 - Introduction to jQuery Video Lecture | Importance of jQuery in Website Development - IT & Software

hi this is Alex from PHP academy' org
and this is a video tutorial for the new
Boston in this video we're going to take
a look at an introduction to jQuery what
it is what it does and why we should use
it in our websites now if you're looking
to perform Ajax operations or cool
effects in your website and you are not
completely familiar with JavaScript
jQuery is a really easy and flexible way
to integrate things like effects jQuery
operations and so on into your website
now jQuery is essentially a JavaScript
library that contains a variety of
functions and other functionality that
allow you to do this extremely easily
some of the benefits of jQuery it is
that it is a reasonably fast loading
library if you've used other JavaScript
libraries you might find they are slow
in comparison to jQuery we've also got
cross browser compatibility so that
brings us to one of the benefits of
jQuery if you use jQuery in a variety of
websites you are first of all using the
same standard so you're using exactly
the same thing this is a benefit over
writing the JavaScript code yourself and
actually using raw JavaScript if you
like and like I said we have cross
browser compatibility which means that
it will work through a variety of web
browsers and if we go to jQuery comm you
can read a short paragraph about jQuery
and some of the benefits here I've just
scrolled over the cross browser tick and
you can see that the the library is
compatible with the following browsers
and versions now jQuery is simply
included into your page and I'm going to
be looking at that a bit later on you
can download a production or development
version the production version is
suitable for if you want to actually use
jQuery and the development version is a
slightly larger uncompressed version
that just allows you to develop plugins
we're going to be looking at plugins a
bit later on anyway
okay so once you've downloaded jQuery
you can go ahead and include it in your
page and you can actually go ahead and
start writing and using this now there's
a short list of companies here that do
actually use jQuery so you can see that
it's an extremely popular and widely
used technology and because it's stream'
extremely easy to use it allows you to
use these effects Ajax calls HTTP
requests extremely easily so if you've
seen for example Google when you enter
the search engine and you start typing
the page changes you have results listed
down the page so it's an extremely
important part of the web now now that
it's evolving into a nicer looking place
so why do we use jQuery the simple
answer is that if you want to create
your website or anything into your
website that produces a lovely nice
output then jQuery is probably the thing
you want to use it's extremely popular
and it's also extremely easy to use now
there's an example on jQuery com of a
small paragraph here and this code will
actually show a particular paragraph if
you like so let's go down and just click
on run code you can see that we've just
been presented with this paragraph here
and we have some text now this is just a
one example of what jQuery can do we
also have a wide library of
functionality with jQuery we can do
things like check if a user name is
available on a on a register form if you
are using say PHP to develop your
website you will love to know that
jQuery will allow you to do things all
on one page for example check if we use
names available in a database you can
then return this and it will be
displayed in the register form so
essentially what we are looking at is
creating a site
allows us to produce results into a page
with as little refreshing as possible so
the main thing with jQuery is that the
the Ajax functionality it uses allows
you to implement Ajax into your website
extremely easily now the jQuery website
contains a vast amount of documentation
on pretty much everything however in
this tutorial series I'm going to be
taking you through all of these and
actually giving you examples along the
way as well as giving you some other
information in a way that you can easily
understand it so this paragraph here
pretty much sums jQuery up in the next
video we're going to actually look at
another example of jQuery and we're
going to take a look at some code behind
this just to show you how it's
implemented then we're going to go on to
look at actually implementing it into
the site and creating our first short
animation technique or animation effect
and then we're going to go on to look at
some more animation effects we're going
to go into Ajax as well so in it's an
extremely powerful plug-in you'll also
notice that there is a plugins or
extremely powerful library sorry you'll
notice that there is actually a plugins
tab up here on the jQuery comm home page
and this is a library of plugins that
various developers have produced and
this allows you to extend jquery's
functionality for a variety of different
applications things like sliders
different slideshows drag a drag and
drop of all things just a wide plug-in
library of different things you might
find interesting
so I'd obviously recommend that you
learn jQuery before you start to use
plugins it's an extremely powerful tool
and it's pretty much the future of you
know JavaScript in terms of how it's
easily written some people do prefer to
write JavaScript on their own on its own
without using a library such as jQuery
and some people claim that jQuery is the
easy option however we
as we have these wide variety of
companies or a large variety of
companies that are actually using jQuery
it just goes to show that it is an
extremely popular tool that when
implemented correctly is extremely
powerful