What is jQuery?
Get a brief introduction to jQuery and its features.
We'll cover the following
jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library designed to update web pages on the fly. It is the most popular JavaScript library, used by around 70 million websites worldwide. The jQuery motto is “write less, do more”, because it reduces many lines of raw JavaScript code into a single line with its simple interface.
Features of jQuery
Following are the core concepts and features of jQuery:
- Event Handling
- DOM Manipulation
- Animations and Effects
- AJAX framework
Including jQuery in webpages
To utilize jQuery functionality, we need to include the jQuery library in our web pages. Add jQuery to a webpage by placing the script
tag inside the head
tag with the src
of the script
tag pointing towards the jQuery library, as shown below.
<head>
<script src="link-to-library"> </script>
</head>
The production release of the jQuery library can be downloaded from jQuery’s website into your website creation folder. You can then load the library by referencing the local copy of jQuery’s library as follows:
<head>
<script src="jquery-3.5.1.js"> </script>
</head>
Alternatively, you can link to the jQuery library on one of the CDNs like this:
<head>
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js"> </script>
</head>
📝 Note: You can learn more about both of these methods here.