jQuery is everywhere, its fast and versatile, and is rapidly becoming as common on websites as CSS. The only small problem you may have is keeping up with development, keeping up with new plugins and tutorials. This article will do just that. All of these tuts have been written within the past eight weeks, bringing you up to speed with latest developments.

jQuery is a very lightweight Javascript library (some call it a framework), that takes most of the headache out from writing pure Javascript in your applications. It has many very powerful features, some of which include: easily traversing the DOM, adding slick animations and effects to elements, and super simple Ajax techniques and methods. Perhaps the jQuery home page describes jQuery most accurately: 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. Let’s briefly go over some of the benefits and features of using the jQuery library. It dramatically reduces the amount of code that needs to be written compared to pure Javascript, which leads to less development time and more readable code. We will go over some example code later on in this article. It is (arguably) much easier to understand than scripting with pure Javascript. In this world, the quicker and easier it is to finish the development process the more time we have to focus on other goals. The documentation is extremely well organized and the community is very active with helping out anyone who may be struggling with a snippet of code. It makes using Ajax extremely easy, it only takes about 5 lines (sometimes less!) of code to make a simple Ajax call. A wide range of plugins and extensions have been developed for jQuery to make it easy for you to get the exact functionality you are looking for. jQuery is fun!

Complex and slick JavaScript-based animation has been made easier with the emergence of frameworks and libraries that give developers the ability to create stunning and eye-grabbing animation and transition effects that make it easy these complex tasks.

For most PC users around the world, JavaScript is a formidable term. As Brian Kemp, a 28-year-old accountant from New York, says, "I've been using a PC for the past 18 years and the Internet for 10 years, and in all this time, I never felt the need to acquaint myself with JavaScript." That was until his web browsing grew increasingly fraught with JavaScript errors cropping up every now and then. "Once I began reading up on JavaScript basics, I realized that it was not the exclusively technical territory that I had taken it to be," admits Brian.

{mos_sb_discuss:23} Because scope in javascript can be the source of very hard to track bugs, we will see how work the variable scoping in javascript. Depending on your programming languages background (block level scoping or not), you may have some surprises.

For this post, I’m going to be using jQuery, because it’s the closest well-known thing to the library I’m currently working on at my new job. (It’s a wrapper for YUI with lots of syntax niceties.) Programming asynchronous actions is a pain in the head. Why can’t I do setTimeout($(’#myNode’).hide, 2000)? I need to bind the hide function to the $(’#myNode’) object for starters, and jQuery doesn’t give you a bind method, and besides, binding and execution scope gives lots of JavaScript novices a headache. Wouldn’t this be nice:

{mos_sb_discuss:23}  The various client-side technologies differ in many ways, starting with the way they get loaded and executed by the web client. JavaScript is a scripting language, whose code is written in plain text and can be embedded into HTML pages to empower them. When a client requests an HTML page, that HTML page can contain JavaScript. JavaScript is supported by all modern web browsers without requiring users to install new components on the system.

I see a lot of person talking about how ajax is cool and it helps you doing things that you couldn’t do before it was “invented”. What most of these people don’t know is that most of the coolest features are not ajax. Ajax is just a way to communicate between a client and a server without reloading the whole page. The rest of it is javascript, DHtml (dynamic Html) and CSS (cascading style-sheet).

{mos_sb_discuss:23} Picture yourself on a beautiful beach on a warm day. The sounds of the waves is music to your hears. You’re on a comfortable chair with a laptop on your knees connected via an incredible WiFi. You’re using a brand new web2.0 application that must be the gratest web site on the web. Then, you see an infamous alert from javascript… 

{mos_sb_discuss:23} You've seen images on web sites that putting your cursor over an image causes the image to roll over into another image. This article shows you a method that also tells the browser to preload the second image. A preloaded image bypasses the pause that would otherwise be present the first time a rollover is called for.