Close on the heels of JavaScript for Web Designers, jQuery for Web Designers is now available.

This course is for web designers who are comfortable with HTML and CSS and looking to learn how to incorporate JavaScript into their repertoire. jQuery is, of course, a JavaScript library (essentially a collection of functions) that patches some holes in JavaScript and makes working with it quite a lot more pleasant. It's included in many popular CMSes, including Drupal and WordPress, and is currently the most popular JavaScript add-on. It's also pretty easy to use once you understand a few key concepts, and opens up a whole bunch of possibilities that are unavailable (or least not easy to do) even with CSS3.

The course also has two topic-specific followups: jQuery UI Widgets and jQuery Data with AJAX. jQuery UI is a library of widgets, behaviors, and other functions that build on jQuery to make certain things even easier than they are with jQuery alone. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a development pattern that combines JavaScript with XML (or HTML) to let you do things like the contents of a page with reloading, pulling in data from external services, and more.

All three parts include concrete examples inspired by my own client work, with the intention of getting you going in your own projects as quickly as possible.

So if you're a lynda.com subscriber already, check them out! If you're not, take a look at the free movies available from each course, and if you like them, sign up. They are my publisher, but I'm also a big fan of the site in general; it's a great resource.