The jQuery Function

When we use the jQuery library, we primarily make use of the functionality it provides by using a function that it provides called the jQuery function. It’s designed to be an immensely flexible function with many uses.

Selecting Elements in the DOM

The most common use is probably for selecting elements in the DOM for a given page. This can be done by passing the jQuery function a CSS-style selector as a string, for example:

jQuery('p');

That instruction would call the jQuery function, which would select all the p elements on the page.

If we wanted to select the body, we could write:

jQuery('body');

We could select every element with a class of foo by writing:

jQuery('.foo');

The $() shorthand

Because we’ll be using the jQuery function frequently, jQuery provides an alias for jQuery(), which is $(). So the example instructions above could be written:

$('p');     // Select all p elements
$('body');  // Select the body element
$('.foo');  // Select all elements with class foo