In a 9 minute video tutorial titled jQuery Basics, Marc Anderson, a SharePoint MVP and published author presents some of the syntactical basic developers will need to master to start producing JavaScript code, including functions from the open source jQuery library.
An important point to understand: JavaScript has evolved into a programming language uniquely capable of operating on the presentation capabilities of commonly available web browsers, and on their ability to produce behaviors with data (for example, animations, forms processing, etc). So this video opens with a presentation of how to instruct a browser with jQuery functions and JavaScript syntax, to present a webpage component as if the CSS for the component is “Display:none”. The “magic” of using jQuery to instruct any web browser to hide the webpage component, as March Anderson notes in this video, is the ease of simply including “hide();” in the JavaScript. Marc explains “the jQuery team has taken care of making sure every browser will work the same based on this command”.
Of course, if this is, in fact, the case, the task of building processes with a combination of JavaScript code and jQuery functions will certainly be much less taxing. We’re used to having to include different style sheets for Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, while managing webpage behaviors for Google Chrome, Firefox and Apple Safari with one core stylesheet. So the type of ease of programming Marc notes will undoubtedly be very welcome to SharePoint 2013 developers.
Marc Anderson also discusses jQuery’s “Document Ready” function, which can be used to ensure a process will not run before required components are in place. This function serves as a safeguard against problems that may arise if processes run without verifying successful loading of “the DOM” by web browsers. “Document Ready” puts the process in a state of suspension pending confirmation “the DOM” has been successfully loaded by the browser.
Finally, Marc talks about the jQuery documentation.
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