Free technical help for digital creators - music, video, art, photography, graphic & web design

jQuery & JavaScript by Matt Ottewill 2012

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JavaScript is a scripting language designed to add interactivity to web pages. JQuery is a pre-made library of JavaScripts presented in a single .js document which you can link to a webpage in order to easily enable a variety of events and interactions. As an alternative to creating or editing complex JavaScripts, JQuery is simple and elegant, and you need only edit the scripts if you want to customise them. It is ideal for those of us with limited JavaScript writing skills!

In addition, many developers have written additional jQuery/JavaScript library documents which enable new effects not available in the primary jQuery library document.

NOTE: See also our CSS examples which contain many "interactive" effects

How JQuery works

In general you will need the following ...

  • A linked jQuery library document
  • some JavaScript code in your <head> or <body> tag
  • some CSS

There are lots of free jQuery libraries and scripts, with their accompanying CSS, available on the web (including this page). Most jQuery needs some CSS, therefore don't forget to grab any CSS (files) which accompany the jQuery documents/examples you download.

How do I install the primary js library doc?

  1. Download the latest jQuery library from the web (just search for jQuery download). At the time of writing (12/4/2012) it is at version 1.7.2.
  2. Save to your local site.
  3. Link it to your page by adding the following to the <head> or <body> tag ...
    <script src="jquery-1.7.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

How do I install other JavaScript / libraries?

You can either link .js documents to your page or add the scripts to the head or body tags, but you will need to read the individual licensing agreements for usage. Some are free, others require payment.

JQuery / JavaScript examples

All here

Further research

www.w3schools.com/jquery/default.asp