The jQuery library has become increasingly popular with web application developers because of its simplicity and ease of use. The library is supported by an active community of developers and has grown significantly over the years after its inception in 2006 by John Resig. Using this library eases complicated tasks and adds to the interactive experience of the end user. Its extensible plugin architecture enables developers to build additional functionalities on top of the core library.

With Microsoft's contribution of Templates, DataLink, and Globalization plugins to the jQuery library and the distribution of jQuery with Visual Studio 2010 onwards, the library has gained popularity with ASP.NET developers. jQuery can be very easily interfaced with ASP.NET controls as well as custom user controls. It can be used to validate controls using client side scripts, thus giving us an alternative for server side Validation Controls. It can be used to incorporate cool animation effects as well as to create graphic-rich pages. It can be used to post AJAX requests to web services, page methods, and HTTP handlers. The possibilities with jQuery
are endless.

This cookbook aims to cover some of the day-to-day tasks faced by ASP.NET developers and how jQuery can be applied to work out the same. We will be focusing on interfacing jQuery with ASP.NET applications and some of the amazing tasks that can be accomplished using this powerful library. The recipes described in this book give fast and easy solutions to some of the common encountered problems in web applications.