jQuery for Beginners - Create Website Animations Easily (Udemy.com)

A three hour, 29 lecture introduction to jQuery from Edwin Diaz, first published in 2015 and last touched in January 2022. The syllabus shows five short sections: setup, basic jQuery syntax, animation, extracting content from a page, and creating content dynamically. That is the whole scope. It is aimed at people who already know HTML and CSS and want to add sliders, fades and menus to a site without writing much raw JavaScript. Around 7,000 students have enrolled and it holds a 4.5 rating from about 1,300 reviews, with roughly nine in ten giving four or five stars.

Reviewers mostly talk about the teaching. Diaz is described as energetic, cheerful and clear, and several students say they came back to him after his PHP and JavaScript courses. The examples are simple and build on each other, which beginners appreciate. The complaints are quieter but real. One four star review says the code on screen isn't indented, some videos move too fast, and the instructor copies and pastes in the later sections so you have to pause to catch up. Another reviewer notes the course itself admits you need proper JavaScript to go further with jQuery, so treat this as a starting point.

At three hours this is a small course, with no quizzes, coding exercises or projects, just 29 lectures, one of them an article. jQuery itself is a legacy tool these days, so the ceiling is low. The case for it is a pleasant afternoon that leaves a nervous beginner able to fade, slide and swap page content with confidence. Anyone wanting AJAX, plugin work or a portfolio piece should pick a longer course.