First Impressions of jQuery
Today I finally decided to dive into the wild world that is JavaScript. I had finally read enough about this spiffy JavaScript frame called JQuery to give it a shot. JQ is more a replacement for JavaScript that it is a an add-on, and provides quite a bit of functionality.
Overall, I was very happy with the expierience. It was a little daunting at first, but I imagine that someone who has more (read: any) JS expierience would have had an eaiser time. I was able to set up a cool picture slide show in about 15 minutes. (See the tutorial and screencase from NETTUTS)
While the jQuery core is pretty simple, there are a ton of plug-ins availible. The possibilities seem endless here to me, and I’m very excited about learning more. I’ve only tried one plug-in, called jFlow, but I liked it, and it very very easy to implement.
jQuery also has a lot of AJAX support, which is what got me interested in the first place. All I’ve done web-scripting wise is PHP/MySQL, and I feel like this opens up the possibilities of what I can do tenfold. I’m very excited to learn more about AJAX, using PHP to write dynamic JavaScript code, and more.
I also like the “wow” factor that comes along with a lot of the cool animations and functionality you can get from this. I’m sure I’ll be writing about this a lot more in the future, and hopefully have some examples of my own work suitible for public viewing. I already have an idea on how to make this jFlow slide show more interesting…
Some helpful links to get you started: