Chapter 12. jQuery

Availability: Any IntelliSense Support from Visual Studio 2008 Onward

"jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript."

http://jquery.com/

In a surprising but excellent move, in late 2008 Microsoft announced that it would be integrating jQuery into Visual Studio. jQuery is used by some very big names such as Amazon, Google, Dell, IBM, and Slashdot (for a full list, please refer to http://docs.jquery.com/Sites_Using_jQuery).

JavaScript is a very powerful language and can produce some amazing results in the right hands. But let's be honest; writing JavaScript can be a painful process. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with JavaScript (apart from unhelpful error messages), but few take the time to learn and understand its intricacies.

If you are involved in web development, you will work with JavaScript at some point. jQuery can make your life much easier by providing easy-to-use methods to perform common tasks in a cross-browser manner.