Top 5 Free Courses to Learn jQuery for Web Developers

Hello guys, if you are thinking to learn jQuery and looking for some awesome free resources e.g. books, tutorials, and online courses then you have come to the right place. In this article, I am going to share some of the best, free jQuery courses from Udemy and Pluarlsight which you can take to learn this awesome JavaScript library. In the past, I have also shared some free books and tutorials on jQuery, which complements these courses. You can also take a look at then while learning different parts of jQuery.

Before I share these free courses, let me briefly talk about what jQuery is and why you should learn it. Well, jQuery is a JavaScript library, but, unlike any other library, it is very powerful and makes client-side scripting really easy.

It provides selectors aking to CSS, which allows you to select multiple components in one go and modify them in just one line of code, e.g. you can grab all the buttons and enable or disable them, just like we did in this example.

You can grab all <p> tags and better style them. You can even do some cool animations, like fade in and fade out and toggle buttons and other elements, just like we did in our tab-based GUI example. jQuery really changes how you can use JavaScript for validation and making your website interactive.

The popularity of jQuery can be understood by the simple fact that many people use jQuery without learning JavaScript. That's not great, but still shows how useful this little library is. The phrase "write less do more" clearly tells what is possible with jQuery.

Now, coming back to the free jQuery courses to learn online, I personally find online course best for learning a new framework or library, followed by a good book.

These free jQuery courses from Udemy and Pluarlsight are actually quite good and similar to many other paid courses. They are mostly made free for the promotional or educational purpose.

There are also cases where a free course on Udemy changed to paid courses once instructor hit their promotion target, so you better check out before enrolling on them.

Also, I suggest you enroll sooner than later even if you don't have time to learn jQuery right now but want to learn in the near future because once you enrolled in the course you get it free for a lifetime and you can learn it anytime.

1. The Complete jQuery Course 2018: From Beginning to Advanced

This is one of the latest course to learn jQuery in 208 and a good place to start if you are learning jQuery this year. It has already got more than 8500 students and it's still free, but may not remain so forever.

The course is divided into three sections: jQuery Intro, jQuery Basics, and jQuery Advanced.

In the first section, you will learn what jQuery is and how to use it, followed by downloading the jQuery library.

In the jQuery basics section, you will learn about essential jQuery concepts like selectors, filters, replacing content, handling events, and some basic animation effects like fading, sliding, toggle, hide and show, etc.

The jQuery Advanced section focuses on advanced selectors and modifying the DOM tree on the fly, e.g. inserting new elements, modifying existing tags, modifying CSS classes, etc.

Overall, a good introductory course for anyone who wants to learn jQuery in 2018. Prior experience with HTML and CSS is desired, however, which you can get by joining free front-end web development courses I have shared earlier.

2. Learn to Use jQuery UI Widgets

If you don't know, jQuery is divided into two libraries: jQuery, and jQuery UI. jQuery is all about validation, selectors, and DOM manipulation, while jQuery UI provides several cool UI widgets which you can use in your web application.

In this course, you will learn how to use tags, accordion effects, date pickers, and many more widgets. The course starts with an introduction and installing jQuery UI.

After that, it covers different jQuery UI widgets, e.g. jQuery Accordion, Tabs, Menu, ToolTip, DatePicker, and Button widgets. After each section, it also contains questions to test your knowledge on that particular jQuery UI widgets.

It's a short course but it's really useful and extremely popular on Udemy. More than 32,550 students are already enrolled in this course and it has got more than 700 ratings with an average of 4.3 which is impressive.

3. HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, jQuery Website From Scratch to Production

This is another free course to learn jQuery by creating responsive websites using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap.

The course starts with HTML 5 basics and explains the essential things you need for creating websites, e.g. images, fonts, links, styling, forms, radio buttons, and checkboxes.

It then goes into Bootstrap, a CSS library for styling web pages. Bootstrap helps to create responsive images, forms, menu, links, and more, plus you'll learn how to use Fontawesome icons with Bootstrap.

In the last section, you will learn jQuery to provide animation and targeting page elements using class and id selectors. You will learn about adding and removing CSS classes from a group of elements using jQuery, changing HTML text, closing and targeting parent and child elements, etc.

In short, this is a good hands-on course to learn practical aspects of jQuery by doing a full project using HTML, CSS, and jQuery. It's also quite popular and more than 9,000 students are enrolled in this course with 204 ratings at an average of 4.4

4. jQuery Whack a Mole Game Exercise

One of my personal tips to learn a new programming language or library is by building games. It's fun and also provides an opportunity to explore and learn a new programming language.

I have developed console games like Tic-Tac-Toe and Rock-Paper-Scissors when I first learned C and C++ and animation games when I learned Java by doing Applet programming.

You can apply the same principle to learn jQuery, particularly with their animation API, and this course is ideal for that. In this free jQuery course, instructor Laurence Svekis will teach you how to create the "Wack a Mole" game from scratch in jQuery.

You will learn jQuery by building an application, e.g. creating an HTML page upon which you'll build a dynamic game board, add styling, and create moving moles. You will enjoy this tweaking and updating of code when you see things happening.

If you like game development, this is a perfect course to learn jQuery by doing some hands-on development.

5. jQuery Fundamentals

This is a very good course to learn jQuery from scratch. It's a beginner level course but you will learn most of the things you need to develop a compelling user interface using jQuery.

This course will teach you how to use different jQuery selectors, e.g. id, class, and tag selectors to select and manipulate DOM elements, handling events, and applying animation to create a responsive user interface.

It also provides comprehensive coverage of jQuery selectors and interacting with the DOM, e.g. iterating through nodes, modifying individual properties and attributes, adding and removing nodes, modifying style like adding/removing CSS selectors, etc.

Apart from APIs and functions, you will also learn how jQuery works and some essential concepts like why using their CDN is better than downloading the jQuery library and working with AJAX features, like loading HTML content from the server, and the load(), get(), post() and ajax() functions.

Conclusion

That's it for this post on the best free courses to learn jQuery online by yourself. You can take these free jQuery courses from the comfort of your office or home and learn at your own pace. You don't need to go anywhere or follow any schedule.

Though you should take note that some free courses on Udemy become paid courses once the instructor reaches their promotional targets, so it's better to enroll sooner rather than later.

Once you've joined a course it will be available to you for life and you can take the course later when you have some time or your priorities change.

Thanks for reading this article so far. If you like these free jQuery courses then please share with your friends and colleagues. If you have any questions or feedback then please drop a note.