Introduction
If you've been doing any web development lately, you've probably heard about jQuery. Released in 2006 by John Resig, jQuery has quickly become one of the most popular JavaScript libraries, and for good reason. It makes working with the DOM so much easier and handles browser inconsistencies beautifully.
The days of writing lengthy document.getElementById() calls and dealing with different browser implementations of XMLHttpRequest are over. jQuery provides a simple, consistent API that works across all browsers.