Hello, world!

Every decent programming tutorial will start with a "Hello, world!" example and this tutorial is yet another one of them. In the previous chapter, we learned how to include jQuery on our page, so that we may start using all of its great features. You need to know a bit more about how jQuery works, before you can start writing your own code, but just to make sure that everything is working, and for you to see how simple jQuery is, let's kick off with a little example:

<div id="divTest1"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
$("#divTest1").text("Hello, world!");
</script>

Okay, so we have a div tag with the id of "divTest1". In the JavaScript code we use the $ shortcut to access jQuery, then we select all elements with an id of "divTest1" (there is just one though) and set its text to "Hello, world!". You may not know enough about jQuery to understand why and how this works, but as you progress through this tutorial, all of the elements will be explained in detail.

Even such a simple task as this one would actually require quite a few extra keystrokes if you had to do it in plain JavaScript, with no help from jQuery:

<div id="divTest2"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.getElementById("divTest2").innerHTML = "Hello, world!";
</script>

And it would be even longer if our HTML element didn't have an ID, but for instance just a class.

Normally though, you wait for the document to enter the READY state before you start manipulating its content. The above examples will work in most browsers and likely even work when you do more advanced stuff, but certain tasks may fail if you try to do them before the document is loaded and ready. Fortunately, jQuery makes this very easy as well, as we will see in the next chapter. After that, we will start looking into one of the most important aspects of jQuery, which has already been used in the above example: Selectors.

The ready event

As mentioned in the previous chapter, it's good practice to wait for the document to be fully loaded and ready, before working with it. This also allows you to have your JavaScript code before the body of your document, in the head section, either directly or through a link to an external JavaScript file. You may do just that by placing your code inside the document ready event. We will use the same example as in the "Hello, world!" chapter, but this time the code is inside the ready event:

<div id="divTest1"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
function DocumentReady()
{
        $("#divTest1").text("Hello, world!");   
}

$(document).ready(DocumentReady);
</script>

What we do here is that we create a function, called DocumentReady, which should be fired as soon as the document is ready for DOM manipulation. In the last line, we use the ready() method to assign our function to the ready event, to tell jQuery that as soon as the document is ready, we want it to call our function.

However, we can shorten this a bit by using an anonymous function of JavaScript instead. This basically just means that instead of declaring the function and giving it a name, we simply create it and then immediately passes the reference to the ready() function. If you're new to JavaScript, then this might seem overly complicated, but as you get used to it, you might appreciate the fewer keystrokes and the less space needed to accomplish the same:

<div id="divTest2"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function()
{
        $("#divTest2").text("Hello, world!");   
});
</script>

But of course, this wasn't even short enough for the jQuery team, so they decided to create a version (overload) of the jQuery constructor which takes a ready function as a parameter, to make it even shorter:

<div id="divTest3"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function()
{
        $("#divTest3").text("Hello, world!");   
});
</script>

In the last example, our anonymous function is passed directly to the jQuery constructor, which assigns it to the ready event. As you will see when you test the code, the event is fired as soon as the page is loaded, most of the time so fast that you won't even realize it.

As already described, wrapping your code in the ready event function is best practice for working with jQuery in your document, and therefore you will see this tutorial using the approach in most of the examples, unless skipped to keep example sizes down.

Method chaining

Yet another one of the really cool aspects of jQuery is the fact that most of the methods returns a jQuery object that you can then use to call another method. This allows you to do command chaining, where you can perform multiple methods on the same set of elements, which is really neat because it saves you and the browser from having to find the same elements more than once. Here's an example, and don't worry about the jQuery methods used in the following examples - they will be explained in later chapters:

<div id="divTest1"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
        $("#divTest1").text("Hello, world!").css("color", "blue");
</script>

It works like this: We instantiate a new jQuery object and select the divTest1 element with the $ character, which is a shortcut for the jQuery class. In return, we get a jQuery object, allowing us to manipulate the selected element. We use that object to call the text() method, which sets the text of the selected element(s). This method returns the jQuery object again, allowing us to use another method call directly on the return value, which is the css() method.

We can add more method calls if needed, but at some point, the line of code will become quite long. Fortunately for us, JavaScript is not very strict when it comes to the syntax, so you can actually format it like you want, including linebreaks and indentations. For instance, this will work just fine as well:

<div id="divTest2"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
        $("#divTest2").text("Hello, world!")
                                        .removeClass("blue")
                                        .addClass("bold")
                                        .css("color", "blue");                                  
</script>

JavaScript will simply throw away the extra whitespace when interpreting the code and execute it as one long line of code with several method calls.

Note that some methods doesn't return the jQuery object, while others only return it depending on the parameters you pass to it. A good example of that is the text() method used above. If no parameters are passed to it, the current text of the selected element(s) is returned instead of a jQuery object, while a single parameter causes jQuery to set the specified text and return a jQuery object.