jQuery for beginners

We are organizing a training session on jQuery for complete beginners. This session will teach you how to use jQuery for DOM manipulation, event handling, ajax and UI interaction. Intended for backend developers (PHP, Rails, Java...) who have a little experience working with javascript.
You can use jQuery to simplify development and reduce your output time. Session Level: Beginner
Date: 11th Jan 2015 (Sunday) 1-4 PM Pre-requisites: Laptop, basic javascript knowledge

What is jQuery?

jQuery, at its core, is a DOM manipulation library. The DOM is a tree structure representation of all the elements of a webpage, and jQuery makes finding, selecting, and manipulating these DOM elements simple and convenient. For example, jQuery can be used for finding an element in the document with a certain property (e.g. all elements with an h1 tag), changing one or more of its attributes (e.g. color, visibility), or making it respond to an event (e.g. a mouse click).
Beyond basic DOM selecting and manipulation, jQuery provides a new paradigm for event handling in JavaScript. The event assignment and the event callback function definition are done in a single step in a single location in the code. jQuery also aims to incorporate other highly used JavaScript functionalities (e.g. fade ins and fade outs when hiding elements, animations by manipulating CSS properties).
The advantages of using jQuery are:
Separates JavaScript and HTML: Instead of using HTML attributes to call JavaScript functions for event handling, jQuery can be used to handle events purely in JavaScript. Thus, the HTML tags and JavaScript can be completely separated.
Brevity and Clarity: jQuery promotes brevity and clarity with features like chain-able functions and shorthand function names.
Eliminates cross-browser incompatibilities: The JavaScript engines of different browsers differ slightly, so JavaScript code that works for one browser may not work on the other. jQuery handles all these cross-browser inconsistencies and provides a consistent interface that works across different browsers.
Extensible: jQuery makes extending the framework very simple. New events, elements and methods can be easily added and then reused as a plugin.