HTML5 and CSS3 All-in-One For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 2

Improving JavaScript and AJAX with jQuery

In This Chapter

Downloading and including the jQuery library

Making an AJAX request with jQuery

Using component selectors

Adding events to components

Creating a simple content management system with jQuery

JavaScript has amazing capabilities. It's useful on its own, and when you add AJAX, it becomes incredibly powerful. However, JavaScript can be tedious. You have a lot to remember, and it can be a real pain to handle multiplatform issues. Some tasks (like AJAX) are a bit complex and require a lot of steps. Regardless of the task, you always have browser-compatibility issues to deal with.

For these reasons, web programmers began to compile commonly used functions into reusable libraries. These libraries became more powerful over time, and some of them have now become fundamental to web development.

As these libraries became more powerful, they not only added AJAX capabilities, but many of them also added features to JavaScript/DOM ...