Beyond jQuery

This book is not about bashing jQuery. Although I am personally very much in favor of directly utilizing what the browser and the JavaScript language provide, the primary purpose of this book is not necessarily to compel developers to abandon all third-party solutions. This is not primarily a stage to host a competition between jQuery and the web API. I have a great amount of respect for those who have maintained and supported jQuery since its inception. I mean no disrespect to those associated with jQuery. In fact, similar arguments could be made about other libraries, such as underscore.js, lodash, or zepto.js. But the ubiquitousness of jQuery makes it the most appropriate reference for this book. The purpose of this book is to teach you about the browser’s native tools. Of course, if you want to continue using jQuery, you may do so (not that you need my permission). This book will hopefully give you the confidence and knowledge you need to remove this dependency from your future projects, if you so choose. At the very least, by reading all of this, you will gain a better understanding of the web API and JavaScript as a language, which is important to your evolution as a web developer, whether you use jQuery or not. Although I do stress use of the native web API and JavaScript sans jQuery, my intention is not to encourage JavaScript as a solution to all problems. JavaScript and the web API are simply tools that may be used to solve some problems. CSS and proper use of HTML may be more appropriate solutions to some of these problems, as you will see later on. In addition to instilling confidence in new web developers and those a bit overwhelmed by the browser’s native API, Beyond jQuery has many other goals. I intend to teach you about the fundamentals, pitfalls, and best practices that are otherwise masked by jQuery. You will learn to perform common operations and solve common problems without the use of jQuery. I will also reveal why jQuery may have been necessary in the past, but is no longer needed with the advent of modern browsers and more evolved web and JavaScript specifications. When you finish this book, you will be able to write more efficient front-end code by examining some performance issues historically associated with jQuery. Native alternatives are described as well. You will learn more about the browser’s API, JavaScript, and even jQuery through detailed explanation and code examples. I demonstrate how common operations are performed using jQuery, and then solve the same problems using the web API and “vanilla” JavaScript. Beyond jQuery contains copious amounts of code snippets, ranging from simple to complex, to help you understand how to develop something substantial without the crutch of a third-party library. I have also created a companion exercise for readers of this book, hosted in a GitHub repository at https://github.com/Beyond-jQuery/exercise . This project demonstrates a number of the techniques and native APIs described throughout this book in a single comprehensive web application. Feel free to clone the exercise repository, run it yourself, and customize the code. Though the code itself is already annotated with helpful comments, you may also ask questions about the exercise in the project’s issue tracker.