Simon Willison blogs about how JQuery won him over. From its faddish start based around CSS selectors (getElementsBySelector), and method chaining, Simon now sees the library in a new light. Simon shows how jQuery supports modern development best practice such as namespaces, giving a quick nod to the richness of jQuery selectors (DOM, CSS and XPath). JQuery's event handling looks natural and offers an event when the dom is ready. It exposes custom events for non-trivial Ajax requests. Simon's so convinced about jQuery that he's willing to overlook his rule that developers should know how a library works before using it.
Tim Huegdon and Mark Aidan Thomas create an elegant wrapper to the YUI Connection Manager that manages repeating Ajax JSON requests. Tim describes the use of Custom Events, and the use of the Observer design pattern, dissects the code and offers a tidy demonstration of the working code. This simplifies JSON requests into declaring a simple function to process the returned JSON object, and a single line to fire off the request (within a setInterval if required)
Ryan Campbell shows how to get the Prototype library up and running, and introduces and documents Protoype's $() function. Form helper functions, getElementsByClassName functions, Element helper functions, Ajax support, timer functions are all covered.
Covers all the methods available on the jQuery library, along with inline code examples. Interestingly, the same documentation is also available as XML and JSON.
A useful overview / introduction of the jQuery library, covering using selectors and XPath expressions to target specific elements in a document, simple Ajax requests, the basic animations available, restructuring a document, creating jQuery plugins.
A lightweight library designed to elegantly dealing with common, repetitive tasks. Great as a small library to handle getting various nodes in a document, adding events, and rendering simple effects.