Getting Started with JQuery

When I first started getting into interaction scripting, I was finding it difficult to understand a lot of what was going on. With a few libraries to choose from I found that a lot of tutorials were written by developers who knew their stuff, to developers who pretty much already knew it too. They were built on a lot of presuppositions and thus left me, at the time a n00b, a little in the dark. I spent some time looking for some good tutorials, and sites that had a lot if valuable information ready to consume.

The libraries I pretty much jumped into at the beginning were Prototype and Script.aculo.us. Both of which are powerful and robust libraries, and are awesome. They can be somewhat a pain to learn early without a lot of experience, but it was demanded of me, and as we all know you need to learn or get left behind. jQuery was relatively new when I first jumped in, and so I did not pay it too much attention at the time. It is such a simple library, and makes writing JavaScript interaction easy and flow well. There is a great community of users that contribute regularly and the documentation is great. As I was getting into learning/re-learning this library, I spent some time looking for some really good sources of information.

I have listed some of the sites below(sites and/or tutorials that help) – some of these articles are a bit new, some a bit old, some to just the site itself. There are a few additions as well that I stumbled across that I thought would also be beneficial for someone just getting their feet wet. All in all they should help you get rolling learning some JQuery, adding another slot to your utility belt:

1: nettuts+ – jQuery for Absolute Beginners: The Complete Series

2: jQuery.com – Tutorials: Getting Started with jQuery

3: SlideShare – jQuery in 15 Minutes

4: Learning jQuery

5: 15 Days of jQuery

6: jQuery for Designers

7: nettuts+ – Learn How to Create a jQuery Plugin

8: Digital Web Magazine – jQuery Crash Course

9: nettuts+ – Adding Form Validation to WordPress Comments using jQuery

10: Visual jQuery

great site for documentation, currently out of date (not sure if they will be updating anytime soon)

All-in-all you should use the JS library that is appropriate for the jop at hand. Do not get stuck in just using one. Each has its benefits and limitations, so discover those, find what works in each situation and adapt to what your needs are.

Cheers!