jQuery Best Practices for Legacy and Today

• Traversing HTML with the jQuery() function
• Introducing the Sizzle CSS selector engine
• Matching nodes by element name, ID, class, position, content, behaviour and context
• Chaining calls to the jQuery() function

Adding and replacing content with jQuery

• Updating, adding and deleting element content
• Inserting nodes into the DOM and manipulating parents and siblings

Dynamically assigning CSS properties

• Adding and removing CSS rules and classes
• Controlling element size and position

Creating accessible, unobtrusive JavaScript

• Leveraging the .ready() method
• Assigning event handlers programmatically

Enhancing pages with animations

• Controlling visibility with .hide(), .show() and .toggle()
• Combining animations and responding to callbacks
• Leveraging object literals to control animations
• Developing custom animations with .animate()

Updating page components asynchronously

• Downloading HTML with the .load() method
• Calling web services with .get() and .post()
• Replacing callbacks with chained deferred objects
• Combining Ajax calls with .when() and .then()

Converting serialised server data to HTML

• Retrieving JSON with .getJSON()
• Returning and parsing XML with .ajax()

Exploring jQuery tools for forms manipulation

• Selecting and setting focus on the first element
• Responding to focus and blur events
• Providing real-time feedback via keyboard events
• Integrating a validation plugin

Integrating popular plugins

• Leveraging contributions from the jQuery community
• Extracting embedded data from semantic HTML
• Manipulating images with slide shows and carousels

Developing jQuery plugins

• Conforming to best practices and naming conventions
• Handling multiple elements
• Enabling method chaining
• Aliasing $ to avoid namespace conflicts
• Consuming object literals to override defaults

Integrating widgets for highly interactive web applications

• Optimising screen real estate with accordions and tabs
• Adding resizable, floating windows with dialogue
• Providing input assistance with autocomplete

Implementing effects

• Creating colour animations with .animate()
• Leveraging complex animation easings and effects

Adding Web 2.0 functionality

• Resizing HTML elements
• Building drag-and-drop user interfaces

Working with mobile pages and controls

• Structuring pages with HTML5 data-* attributes
• Saving space with listviews and collapsible blocks
• Initialising pages with pageinit and handling touch events