Who Should Take This Course and Why?

Are there any prerequisites?

In this course, we introduce you to a variety of powerful tools offered by jQuery for interactive web-development. These tools include animations, visual effects, and advanced functionality. This course has three major prerequisites:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript

You will need a decent understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to learn jQuery. While the knowledge of HTML and CSS is required, the necessity of JavaScript is less important. However, we strongly feel that you need to know some basic JavaScript concepts before diving into jQuery. We have designed a quiz below that will gauge your understanding of the JavaScript concepts used extensively in jQuery.

If you are unable to answer most of the above questions, we encourage you to explore some of our excellent introductory JavaScript courses, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from Scratch or Introduction to JavaScript: First Steps, before continuing with this course.

Why study this course?

You probably began your web development journey using plain HTML and CSS. HTML is a markup language that controls the basic structure of the web page, while CSS controls the look and feel of different elements on the web page. Thus, web pages built using only HTML and CSS are largely unresponsive and require a great deal of effort to interactivity.

Static and non-interactive webpages are a thing of the past. Nowadays, users want responsive and interactive web pages with the right mix of animations, interaction, and visual effects. To add interactivity and advanced behavioral functionality, we require the power of JavaScript. But raw JavaScript can be complex and intimidating. For example, examine the JavaScript code for the simple task of updating the text inside all paragraph elements in a webpage shown below.

In this beginner-level course, we introduce you to jQuery, a widely used library built on top of JavaScript. jQuery provides a simple, yet powerful, interface that speaks with the JavaScript underneath. It removes the unnecessary complexity of raw JavaScript and simplifies the required code. Check out how the same JavaScript code for updating the text inside all paragraph elements is reduced to a one-liner in jQuery, with a more straightforward interface:

This convenient interface of jQuery has made it one of the most popular JavaScript libraries and an essential skill set for any web developer.