Over the past few months it’s become clear to me exactly how wrong I was. jQuery is an exceptionally clever piece of engineering. It neatly encapsulates an extraordinary range of common functionality, and provides a clever plugin API for any functionality not included by default. It takes a core abstraction—that of a selection of DOM elements—and extracts as much mileage out of it as possible. Most importantly, it does so in a way that obeys best practices and plays well with other JavaScript code.
Most introductions to jQuery focus on designers and inexperienced developers. I’m going to try to explain why jQuery should be of interest to experienced programmers as well.
