Getting Started with jQuery

ByWalter Wimberly

Since jQuery is a JavaScript library, you will need to use a script tag to load it in.

Loading It Local

If you host your own server, you can download a copy from jQuery’s website, and then add it to a script tag to find on your server.

<script src="\js\jquery.js"><script>

Note: You must have a server. Most browsers will not allow you to load an external JavaScript file from a local file.

Note: This assumes that you have downloaded the file to a folder called js, under your main website folder. You may need to update the path and/or filename depending upon how you have configured your site and what you called the file.

Loading from a CDN

You can choose to load jQuery from a CDN, or Content Delivery Network. These spread the work of hosting files across the globe, so your users download from a server physically closer to them. Additionally, if they visit another site, which is using jQuery through the CDN, before yours, it will already be in their cache – which will help your site load faster.

<script
  src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.7.1.min.js"
  integrity="sha256-/JqT3SQfawRcv/BIHPThkBvs0OEvtFFmqPF/lYI/Cxo="
  crossorigin="anonymous"></script>

So why not always load from a CDN? Well, you might be on an Intranet site, which blocks external resources. Some countries will block some known CDN sites. And you may not like giving up the control of what happens if you cannot access that site because the service goes down, or away.

Note: The integrity and crossorigin attributes are used for Subresource Integrity (SRI) checking. This allows browsers to ensure that resources hosted on third-party servers have not been tampered with. Use of SRI is recommended as a best-practice whenever libraries are loaded from a third-party source. Read more about this at srihash.org.

Once Loaded… Now What?

Once you have added your library reference to your HTML page, you can then start to write code using the jQuery library. Common things done with jQuery include:

Getting Started with jQuery was originally found on Access 2 Learn

Assistant Professor

Walter Wimberly is an Assistant Professor at a regional college in Tennessee, teaching Computer Science in the Software Engineering track. He works as a student advisor, oversees curriculum changes, develops new courses, and manages the advisory panel.
Walter taught full time for about 7 years, before going back into “industry” as a full stack Software Developer for a dozen years. There he focused on web based projects coding in JavaScript/jQuery and utilizing the Bootstrap CSS Framework on the front-end, and coding in PHP, ASP/ASP.Net, SQL on the back-end.

Since he loves teaching, he taught as an adjunct web and digital media classes for eight (8) years, while working in industry, and has since returned to teaching full time.

He has been married for over 25 years, and is father to several special needs boys. As such, he is working on some projects to help others who have special needs to be self-sufficient, and support the care givers of those with special needs. Check out his Autism blog for more info.

Similar Posts