Chapter 7. jQuery

I find jQuery to be one of the coolest things in web development. I was doing some self study, following the hours of the class I mentioned, at the wonderful university town of Leuven, which had an equally wonderful computer book store. This is where I discovered jQuery.

Every chapter that follows relies/depends on, and uses, jQuery so it is very important to know jQuery well from the get go. So, what exactly is jQuery? It is a popular JavaScript library, and the overall benefit of using it is that you can write cleaner, more compact code.

So, what is a library? Well, it can be a place with a lot of books in it. I, myself, like the one of the Plantijn-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, where they all printed their books themselves centuries ago. Rubens was the illustrator and house portraitist. UNIX and Java folks think of libraries as already compiled code, typically containing predefined functions, which are placed in a file of a special format and can be loaded with...