Best Resources to Learn jQuery: 5 Tutorials and Online Courses, Top 25 Plugins

jQuery is a javascript library that allows you to get more things done while writing less code. It simplifies many JavaScript tasks, as well as CSS animation, event handling, DOM manipulation, and so on.

What is jQuery? Why Web Developers Should Use it?

jQuery is a JavaScript library that was designed to make cross-browser web development faster, easier and less messy. jQuery simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animation effects, DOM manipulation and Ajax interactions. It is used by approximately half of the websites on the internet.

The advantages of jQuery are speed, performance and ease-of-use. It is a very lightweight library that can execute JavaScript on the client side for fast results without reloading or refreshing any pages. The animations run smoothly because they are handled by the browser instead of slowing down your computer’s CPU like other animation libraries do (e.g., Flash). In addition to being easy to use, jQuery also has great documentation with tons of examples and tutorials from beginner through advanced levels.

jQuery saves you time when coding HTML documents as it simplifies traversal using CSS selectors: elements within an HTML document can be accessed based on their ID, name attribute or tag type . This not only makes programming faster but more efficient because fewer lines of code are needed.

jQuery has many functions and plugins, which can be used to create various effects such as animations, event handling (e.g., hiding/showing elements), DOM manipulation (adding classes) and more. jQuery is also easy for beginners because it supports interactive methods such as “show(), hide()” or “fadeOut().” These commands have built-in easing effects that make the animation smoother than if they were done without jQuery. This makes programming easier with less complex code involved in simple tasks like animating HTML objects on a web page.

The addition of a library like jQuery can make your life easier when coding websites because you will be able to devote more time to the design aspects instead of spending hours trying to figure out how an animation works or why something isn’t working properly on Internet Explorer version eight. The pros are clearly greater than any cons that come with using such an easy-to-use tool.

jQuery Tutorials and Online Courses

If you are interested in this programming language, here are some of the top resources where you can learn jQuery:

1. Youtube’s Learn jQuery in 15 minutes by DevTips – Travis is a fast talker that gets to the point right away. His videos are free, and can get you on track to learn right away! There are a total of three videos that cover all the basic stuff. And yes, he somehow manages to squeeze all that in just 15 minutes.
2. The Complete jQuery Course: From Beginner To Advanced! – Some people are comfortable with high-paced learning, similar to Travis’s style, while others not so much. Unlike Travis’s high-paced videos, this course includes 51 lessons, takes 6 hours, and it guides you through everything from the most fundamental stuff to the most advanced ones used by professional coders daily.
3. W3Schools – W3School is a platform for learning, testing, and training programming languages. Their jQuery section guides you through the world of this programming language and allows you to learn at your pace for free. Each section is covered by a quiz where you can test what you’ve learned so far. When you are done learning, you can even take a shot at the certification program, get tested, and earn a degree. However, unlike their learning resources, the certification program is not free.
4. Code Academy’s Introduction to jQuery – Code Academy is an online platform that offers jQuery training. All of their content is split into small lessons supported by interesting lessons that challenge what you’ve learned. Their jQuery course is so popular that it has been taken by employers from companies such as Facebook, Google, IBM, and even NASA.
5. Learn.jquery.com – This is a learning center designed and run by jQuery programmers and enthusiasts. Not only that it hosts pretty much anything that you need to learn jQuery, but it is the home to a waste community of jQuery users. If you are stuck with something, you can always open a thread on their online forum. There will be always someone to help you out or direct you to the right place where you can find the answers to your problem.
6. jQuery UI in Action – jQuery UI in Action is the go-to resource for learning how to develop projects with jQuery UI. The book walks you through interactive widgets and interactions, showcasing real-world demos that provide a walkthrough of cutting edge UI technologies via jQuery. Already familiar with jQuery? You’ll deepen your knowledge by creating 11 different applications without having to spend hours building something from scratch.
7. 1 hour jQuery – Learning how to code can give you the power of a masters degree all from your keyboard! This step-by-step 1 hour tutorial covers everything you need to know about jQuery. You will start off decently by looking at how HTML works, then learning the fundamentals needed for coding using JavaScript. After that, it will teach you some basics and get into a slightly more advanced section on jQuery with topics like Animation tricks.

UI Kits

1. jQuery UI – jQuery UI is a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library.
2. Kendo UI – Quickly build eye-catching web apps using Kendo UI’s ultimate collection of JavaScript UI components with libraries for jQuery, Angular, React, and Vue.

Best jQuery Plugins

1. pagePiling.js – A simple and easy to use library that creates fullscreen scrolling websites (also known as single page websites or onepage sites) and adds landscape sliders inside the sections of the site.
2. Flickerplate – A module that lets you flick through content.
3. RTO+P Video Player –  Play HTML5 video across all browsers.
4. Animsition – This is a simple plugin for adding page transitions with CSS animations.
5. Focuspoint – jQuery plugin for ‘responsive cropping’. Dynamically crop images to fill available space without cutting out the image’s subject.
6. rowGrid.js – A small, lightweight jQuery plugin for placing items in straight rows.
7. jsGrid – jsGrid is a lightweight client-side data grid control based on jQuery. It supports basic grid operations like inserting, filtering, editing, deleting, paging, and sorting. jsGrid is flexible and allows to customize its appearance and components.
8. Vide – Add video as background.
9. Dense.js – Dense is a jQuery plugin that offers an easy way to serve device pixel ratio aware images, bringing in retina support to your website.
10. Face Detection – A jQuery/Zepto Face Detection plugin that works on images and videos.
11. Slick – Slick’s a jQuery plugin that gives you fully responsive carousels of just about every kind you would think of thanks to its available settings.
12. Simple jQuery Slider – A simple slider that does what a simple slider has to do: slide slides! The slider has been developed with the idea to provide a slider that can be used in all your projects. It provides you with the basic features you need from a slider.
13. anoFlow – Responsive lightbox gallery based on jQuery.
14. Justified.js – A jQuery plugin that creates a justified image grid of supplied images. 
15. Shuffle Images – Shuffle Images by Pete R. Shuffle Images let you display and shuffle multiple images by moving cursor around or several other ways to trigger.
16. jQuery.fontFlex.js – a lightweight jQuery extension for dynamically changing font sizes according to container or browser width. 
17. t.js – Add typewriter-like text effects.
18. Morphext – The simplest text rotator powered by jQuery and Animate.css.
19. Muuri – Responsive, sortable, filterable and draggable grid layouts.
20. Labelauty – A nice and lightweight jQuery plugin that gives beauty to checkboxes and radio buttons and allows custom labels for each status of (un)checked inputs.
21. fontIconPicker – jQuery fontIconPicker is a small (3.22KB gzipped) jQuery plugin which allows you to include an elegant icon picker with categories, search and pagination inside your administration forms.
22. HideSeek – HideSeek is simple, yet customizable jQuery plugin for live search.
23. ClockPicker – ClockPicker was designed for Bootstrap in the beginning. So Bootstrap (and jQuery) is the only dependency(s).
24. table-dragger – Easily add drag-and-drop sorting to your table without jQuery.
25. Tilted page scroll – Create a beautiful 3D tilted effect on scroll.
26. SVGMagic – SVGMagic is a simple jQuery plugin that searches for SVG images (including background- and inline dataimages) on your website and creates PNG versions if the browser doesn’t support SVG.

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