Since hitting the web development world in 2006, jQuery has been a dominant force in shaping the JavaScript scene, enabling easy yet robust dynamic web applications. If you want to know more about jQuery in general, checkout an earlier blog post about why jQuery is so freakin’ awesome. If you’re sold on jQuery and want to learn the basics, read on. At it’s core, jQuery is a JavaScript library that allows you to access, manipulate, and animate virtually any element on a webpage. Need to calculate a total based on three other input fields? Roger that, captain. Want to animate …

jQuery is a JavaScript library for manipulating and traversing the DOM, handling events, doing AJAX, and creating animations, among other nifty uses. In other words, jQuery is the fast, easy, and flexible way to supercharge your JavaScript and your web applications in general. Using jQuery allows you to quickly build interactive applications that are both effective and visually pleasing.

jQuery 1.0 was released in 2006. When I first witnessed jQuery at the beginning of this year, I immediately started kicking myself for all the wasted effort I spent wrestling with JavaScript over the last three years. If you don’t use jQuery already, you’ll probably do the same.