jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript library created by John Resig in 2006. jQuery simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for Rapid Web Development.
This tutorial is designed for software programmers who wants to learn the basics of jQuery and its programming concepts in simple and easy ways. This tutorial will give you enough understanding on components of jQuery with suitable examples.
Before proceeding with this tutorial, you should have a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Document Object Model (DOM) and any text editor. As we are going to develop web based application using jQuery, it will be good if you have understanding on how internet and web based applications work.
What is jQuery?
jQuery is a lightweight, “write less, do more”, JavaScript library.
The purpose of jQuery is to make it much easier to use JavaScript on your website.
jQuery takes a lot of common tasks that require many lines of JavaScript code to accomplish, and wraps them into methods that you can call with a single line of code.
jQuery also simplifies a lot of the complicated things from JavaScript, like AJAX calls and DOM manipulation.
The jQuery library contains the following features:
HTML/DOM manipulation
CSS manipulation
HTML event methods
Effects and animations
AJAX
Utilities
Why jQuery?
There are lots of other JavaScript libraries out there, but jQuery is probably the most popular, and also the most extendable.
Many of the biggest companies on the Web use jQuery, such as:
Microsoft
IBM
Netflix
Google 
Facebook