About This Site
Learning how and when to use jQuery is a different process for each and every web developer, depending largely on experience with the primary tools for front-end development (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and knowledge of general programming principles. Over the years developers of all stripes have come to rely on our API documentation for help figuring out how to do exactly what they need to do.
However, API documentation alone cannot serve as a guide to solving problems and fostering a true understanding of web development. Over the years, an ecosystem of blog posts, books, support forums and channels has grown to help cover the hows and whys of developing with jQuery, as well as explaining best practices, techniques, and workarounds for common problems. This type of documentation has been invaluable resource for millions of people, but the experience of navigating these waters can be frustrating as often as it is fulfilling, as developers struggle to identify trustworthy resources, determine whether what they're reading is actually up to date, and figure out those magical search keywords that are just right!
This site represents the jQuery Foundation's ongoing effort to consolidate and curate this information in order to provide this crucial "narrative documentation" to our community and serve the following goals:
- Provide our users with a digestible reference on all aspects of using jQuery, from the basics of getting started and performing common tasks to more advanced topics like approaches to structuring code and where jQuery fits into modern web application development.
- Provide our contributors a central, open place to collaborate and provide a dependable, highly sharable resource that will improve our users' support experiences
- Foster an environment by which users are encouraged to become contributors and build the skills to help them work on jQuery -- or any other open source project!
In order to achieve these goals, all of this site's content is maintained publicly on GitHub and is licensed under the MIT License. To learn more about how the site works, take a look at our contributing guide.
History
The jQuery Learning site has its roots in two primary places.
The first is Rebecca Murphey's jQuery Fundamentals, a free, open source book on jQuery basics she originally released in 2010. Seeking a better home where the information could be both maintained going forward, and consumed in a more piecemeal fashion, Rebecca donated the content to the jQuery Foundation to form the basis of what was then an abstract idea for some sort of "learning center."
The second is docs.jquery.com, that erstwhile
chestnut still living out its final days before it will be shut down in early
2013. Since we've moved the API documentation for jQuery Core off that domain,
we needed a place that could serve a similar need -- documentation (that anyone
can contribute to) that gets into the "how-to" and FAQs -- without clumsy
barriers to entry like finding the right person to set you up with a special
wiki account and forcing all authoring into a textarea.
About the Beta
Though this resource will never truly be "done," the current version of this site should still be considered something of a preview. We still have a number of improvements we want to make to the content, user experience, and site build before we're ready to call it a "final release." At the same time, however, it's important for us to open the doors now so we can begin providing better docs to people who need the right away and spread the word about this effort. If you're interested in helping us reach the finish line, we invite you to please read more about how you can get involved with contributing!