How jQuery Saved My Life

Well, maybe not my life, but definitely my sanity (both of equal usefulness and importance.) It started out as a bit of an accident, actually. One day at work as I was slaving away with my DOM coding – which always feels like a mild punishment when I need to do it – I was searching for the answer to one of the many questions I had about traversing through my many elements and I stumbled upon this thing called jQuery. I understand now that I was insanely late jumping onto the Javascript library train, but this type of thing is not new for me considering my very recent adoption of Firebug (which has saved my life on multiple occasions as well.) Of course immediately after reading ‘will save you a lot of time’ and before completely understanding its purpose, I downloaded every piece of the library I could find and started my journey into the world of framework libraries. I know a lot of stubborn people out there that argue that you need to be lazy or a poor programmer to use a pre-made library – but to be completely honest, I don’t really like those people anyway.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with using a Javascript library, or any library for that matter. If it saves you time in making what you need to make, then you’re an idiot not to use one. If not for that reason alone, at least do it for the sake of your head and all those migraines you’ve been getting or inevitably will be getting when trying to traverse yourself through the elusive DOM. (I would like to note here though that I don’t think libraries are an excuse not to learn – you should always know how to do the hard way before opting for the easy way. No excuses. Period.)

I know that there are a few good Javascript libraries out there – I just happened to pick up on jQuery. I would highly suggest downloading a couple of them and seeing how you work with it before making a choice.

Here’s a list of a couple you can check out:

1. jQuery

2. MooTools

3. Prototype

And lastly, here’s a good and pretty complete list of the various Javascript libraries not mentioned here, Wikipedia: List of JavaScript libraries.