Coming up to Speed with jQuery

I’m an avid reader of anything that relates to technology - web, programming, algorithmic, AI, investing... The only limiter for what interests me is the amount of time I have that I can focus on any one thing at a time. Recently I picked up a book on the “new” ASP.Net MVC framework - ASP.NET MVC in Action by Palermo, Scheirman and Bogard. Although this book was written by very knowledgeable authors who truly understood their domain, I ended the book feeling that it was very disorganized and really didn’t pertain to ASP.Net MVC much at all. Most of the book was advertising the MvcContrib (which the authors created) and the CodeCampServer project. Much of the discussion was spent on describing how they weren’t going to explain the “nitty-gritty” but ended up not really explaining anything. Don’t think I’m being ungrateful for the contents of the book, it’s just that its benefit ended up being vastly different than what I had originally picked it up in the hopes of discovering. I’m sure at this point you’re wondering how this has anything to do with jQuery and that’d be a fair concern. What’s interesting about the MVC framework created by Microsoft is that they bundle in jQuery. This truly came as a surprise to me when I first downloaded it simply for the fact that Microsoft is not well known for using anything that was not built in-house - most likely due to the penchant for everyone to sue them. When I first discovered this I was intrigued and so I started my journey to see what jQuery had to offer. 

Over the past several weeks I’ve been working on a project that utilizes the ASP.NET MVC 2 framework for its underlying web architecture. Since I knew that jQuery was already “compatible” with MVC I decided to see what it could do. I started to search ad hoc on the web for different packages to determine how healthy the project was and how vibrant its community participation was. Overall, it’s has a very solid  following. At this point I’ve already integrated several of the core plugin packages such as jQuery UI (which itself has several UI components included within it as well as an absolutely great theming utility on its website) and jqGrid (open source version). These plugins work great out of the box, but as with anything that you start to use, you’ll eventually get to the point where you need a little more control over everything. This brings me to the purpose of this (now long-winded) blog. Over the next several posts I hope to cover in a decent amount of depth how jQuery works and provide a running example (with working site code) to show the items in action. I’m still new to blogging, so if my style does not work well in this media, please give feedback so that I can improve and provide the most value to you.