Book Image

Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

Book Image

Learning jQuery : Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning jQuery
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

The $() Factory Function


No matter which type of selector we want to use in jQuery—be it CSS, XPath, or custom—we always start with the dollar sign and parentheses: $()

As mentioned in Chapter 1, the $() function removes the need to do a for loop to access a group of elements since whatever we put inside the parentheses will be looped through automatically and stored as a jQuery object. We can put just about anything inside the parentheses of the $() function. A few of the more common examples include:

  • A tag name: $('p') gets all paragraphs in the document.

  • An ID: $('#some-id') gets the single element in the document that has the corresponding some-id ID.

  • A class: $('.some-class') gets all elements in the document that have a class of some-class.

Note

Making jQuery Play Well with Other JavaScript Libraries

In jQuery, the dollar sign $ is simply shorthand for jQuery. Because a $() function is very common in JavaScript libraries, conflicts could arise if more than one of these libraries...