The main topic of the course is learning the building blocks of programming in JavaScript and animation foundations. To achieve this goal we needed to hide a lot of the unnecessary complexities of JavaScript and how it interacts with the DOM.

What is the DOM?
The DOM is the document object model. In layman's terms, it's the way JavaScript natively interacts with the HTML document. Unfortunately it is incredibly convoluted and complicated and it's rare to see developers interacting with the dumb structure directly (sorry, I mean DOM structure directly). We won't even go into the details of how it works because it's just irrelevant to a modern developer. There are better, faster and easier ways to interact with the DOM and that's where jQuery comes into the picture.

jQuery makes interacting browsers and the DOM easy and simple. Instead of learning complex DOM rules, all we need to know is basic CSS and we are set. As long as you know basic CSS styling rules, you should be set working with jQuery as well. Beyond that the library itself saves us from needing to worry about many cross browser compatibility issues. The team behind jQuery updates and maintains the platform holistically, caring about all the browsers that they support thereby limiting your need to worry as deeply about compatibility.

And that leads us to our second and main hero Library: GSAP...