WDS09: jQuery - From Novice to Ninja

Apparently I'm now a jQuery ninja. Who knew?

with Earle Castledine

My Day One Workshop for Web Directions South 09 was run by Earle Castledine (with a little help from Craig Sharkey) and aimed to teach me a bit about jQuery. I've been looking for the right excuse to make the switch from MooTools to jQuery for a while now. The MooTools community tries hard, and while I think that it is technically a better library, jQuery just wins hands down when it comes to real-world usage, available plugins and general community support and adoption. But this is not a jQuery vs MooTools post; there are enough of them out there already.

Earle did a great job of simplifying the concepts for the javascript noobs in the room without alienating the more advanced peeps who already have an understanding of jQuery and what it can do. True, it started off a bit slow, but before too long we were using jQuery to do most of the cool stuff that jQuery works best for: traversing the DOM and turning up the Ajax-o-meter. A few choice dairy-related phrases emerged from the session too, which can only be defined as "had to be there" moments, such as "it all made sense when I saw the cheese" and "they go together like cheese and... and stuff."

I already have a few projects that are half-finished, requiring just a bit of progressive enhancement to make them a bit more awesome, so I'll definitely be playing with jQuery a bit more this week to bed-down a few concepts. Thanks Earle.