Taking a break from rails tonight to go through the peepcode video on jQuery. The advice I had from a pal is that jQuery is easy and separate enough from javascript that it can be learned by itself. I’m not certain I agree just right now, but it’s definitely a big eye-opener.
The big take home point for beginners here seems to be learn the following:
$()
is a wrapper function. It serves mainly to take an argument, and make a jquery methods available on that argument. For example:
$("#someId")
will wrap the someId element on a page inside jQuery and make jQuery methods available:
$("#someId").fadeOut
The other thing is that you’re going to be doing a lot of finding elements, so learn your bloody selectors! The jQuery documentation on selectors contains a bunch of jQuery specific stuff. Otherwise, I’ve been mostly learning them via writing selenium automation tests at work.
I have a ton of documentation to research on test the rails view for a talk I’m leading tomorrow. Wish me luck!
Jam and Bees 