I started using jQuery last week and I am finding it to be a great library so far. It is very easy to interact with elements on the page in fun and creative ways.

As a sample, I have been working with the Northwest Nazarene University web team and they wanted to develop a simple wizard they can put on any page that will help prospective students find the degree they are interested in. I decided to tackle that task. At first I was looking at slide show sample, then one of the other developers showed me the beauty of .load(), which allows me to load into any arbitrary element the contents of any file or web address. After playing with .load() and the event handlers for an hour I figured out a way to implement what they wanted. It took me maybe 4 hours going from ground zero of no knowledge on the subject to implementing a working system complete with calls to a backend PHP file that gets the contents for the wizard from the database. jQuery is really neat, I highly encourage other web developers to check it out. A working sample may be found here or on NNU’s website.

Here is the jQuery code I used. Try not to be too critical, I am positive there has to be a better way of doing this. I still am learning the vast amount of options available to me in jQuery.