Display posts from array using jQuery

As a preface, I am fairly new to using WordPress and I don’t understand the syntax used in many of the support/documentation posts (I am use to programming in Python and Java).

Here is my problem: I want to use get_posts or something similar to generate an array of posts based on an ID tag. Once I have that, I want to use a jQuery UI slider to load a specific post depending on the position of the slide bar.

I currently have a test HTML page that can use the slider to change the “href” attribute of a hyperlink, but this obviously isn’t the functionality I want.

Can someone point me in the right direction as to what functions I need to use to work with an array of posts and display one of them?