With modern web design JavaScript has become a must have to make your website stand out however for someone just starting out it can be an incredibly daunting language to try and get your head around. I was once in this position and was searching through tutorials which ranged from useless but easy, e.g. changing the content of a header on the click of a button, to overly complex tutorials which presumed you already knew all the syntax and the functions and just gave you a lump of incomprehensible code. This became increasingly frustrating and then I stumbled upon jQuery. jQuery is a JavaScript library which allows you to create something that may take twenty lines of JavaScript with one simple function. Also it is compatible with every browser and also works on the iPhone. I found it to be incredibly useful as not only does it allow you to achieve very cool effects very quickly it also introduces you to the JavaScript syntax which makes it a lot easier to learn later on.

Getting started using jQuery

The very first thing to do is to link the jQuery library to your document. To do this you have a couple of choices you can either use the jQuery hosted one which is available at jquery.com or you can use the Google hosted version which is available here https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/devguide. It doesn't make a huge difference which one you use but in general I use the Google one.

To include the Google library in your script you don't need to download anything, you simply insert the link into theof your page. For example with the Google one you would include [removed][removed] in the top of your script. To get the latest version for the Google library you go to the link above and scroll down to jQuery and then copy and paste the snippet.  This would need to go into the head of every page you used jQuery on.

To use the jQuery library you go to jquery.com and then click on the download (jQuery) button. This will then open up a very confusing plain text document. This is the library of JavaScript functions that jQuery uses. You simply copy and paste all of the code and then create a file in you preferred plain text editor and save the file. When saving the file I strongly suggest saving it as jquery and then the version that you are using. If you are unsure what version you are using it is in the first line of the document, for example the one I'm using says jQuery v1.8.2 so I would save it as jQuery.1.8.2. If you don't have a plain text editor already I would suggest using aptana as it's free and has all of the features you could ever need for web design and it's PC and mac compativle. This also would need to go into the head of every page you used jQuery on.