The purpose of jQuery is to make it much easier to use JavaScript on your website.

What You Should Already Know

Before you start studying jQuery, you should have a basic knowledge of:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript

If you want to study these subjects first, find the tutorials on our Home page.

What is jQuery?

jQuery is a lightweight, “write less, do more”, JavaScript library.

The purpose of jQuery is to make it much easier to use JavaScript on your website.

jQuery takes a lot of common tasks that require many lines of JavaScript code to accomplish, and wraps them into methods that you can call with a single line of code.

jQuery also simplifies a lot of the complicated things from JavaScript, like AJAX calls and DOM manipulation.

The jQuery library contains the following features:

• HTML/DOM manipulation
• CSS manipulation
• HTML event methods
• Effects and animations
• AJAX
• Utilities

Tip: In addition, jQuery has plugins for almost any task out there.

Why jQuery?

There are lots of other JavaScript frameworks out there, but jQuery seems to be the most popular, and also the most extendable.

Many of the biggest companies on the Web use jQuery, such as:

• Google
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Netflix

	Will jQuery work in all browsers? The jQuery team knows all about cross-browser issues, and they have written this knowledge into the jQuery library. jQuery will run exactly the same in all major browsers, including Internet Explorer 6!

WELCOME TO PHP!

What You Should Already Know

Before you continue you should have a basic understanding of the following:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript

What is PHP?

• PHP is an acronym for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor”
• PHP is a widely-used, open source scripting language
• PHP scripts are executed on the server
• PHP is free to download and use

	PHP is an amazing and popular language!It is powerful enough to be at the core of the biggest blogging system on the web (WordPress)! It is deep enough to run the largest social network (Facebook)! It is also easy enough to be a beginner’s first server side language!

What is a PHP File?

• PHP files can contain text, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code
• PHP code are executed on the server, and the result is returned to the browser as plain HTML
• PHP files have extension “.php”

What Can PHP Do?

• PHP can generate dynamic page content
• PHP can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the server
• PHP can collect form data
• PHP can send and receive cookies
• PHP can add, delete, modify data in your database
• PHP can be used to control user-access
• PHP can encrypt data

With PHP you are not limited to output HTML. You can output images, PDF files, and even Flash movies. You can also output any text, such as XHTML and XML.

Why PHP?

• PHP runs on various platforms (Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, etc.)
• PHP is compatible with almost all servers used today (Apache, IIS, etc.)
• PHP supports a wide range of databases
• PHP is free. Download it from the official PHP resource: www.php.net
• PHP is easy to learn and runs efficiently on the server side

Now it’s time to check out of this course. Have fun!