Codecademy "jQuery" notes
The "jQuery" class track was my first Codecademy class where everything is new to me. It was a lot of fun!
I'm very amused that the "new HTML" has ditched a lot of the mechanisms of the "old HTML" yet they're all together in one big bucket of HTML. There were input forms using the input fields that I had known before, but they don't bother with the form submit at the end. Entirely different script code is executed to replace the old-school form submit.
A whole lot of "new HTML" is hitched to the <div> element. Which, in the old world, does nothing. (That's not a sarcastic remark, read the official specification.) But with CSS and jQuery, the empty placeholder of a <div> becomes the starting point for visuals, actions, responses, all kinds of things impossible in old static HTML.
This was also the first Codecademy class that referenced API documentation for the class material. I was a little annoyed with the previous classes that lacked a pointer for students to get more information.
Towards the end of the class, they introduced jQuery UI, which is a separate library built on top of jQuery. I think the fact they were two separate entities deserved more emphasis, and the class didn't get into why they were two separate things at all.
Once I understand how the design philosophies differ between the two, I will have an idea if I should look in one or the other for any specific thing I might be researching. But I don't have that yet! So I'll have to look in both places until I do.