I came across this letter a few weeks ago written by a user of jQuery. Not until recently, I hadn't actually read the whole letter. But trust me, it's worth the read.
My First Reaction to the letter
I was first like "oh, how stupid". I thought his attitude was all wrong when writing the "letter to non-believers" on jQuery. Then I looked at jQuery last Saturday. Fact is, I couldn't stop! jQuery blended itself perfectly to a project that I am working on (which is going to be SUCH as great site... can't wait to talk about it on this blog).
My Usage
I needed a way to do simple Ajax requests. Turns out there are multiple ways to start an Ajax request. You could do something simple like this: $.get or $.post. Or you can do an Ajax request like this: $.ajax({type: "GET", url: "----", dataType: "script"}). Lucky for me, I have a few choices for returning stuff; I can choose the following dataTypes: XML, HTML, Script (JavaScript), or JSON.
For those of you who don't know, JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. The inventor, Doug Crockford (now works for Yahoo! Developer Network), wanted a way to push data types through Ajax requests without pushing out XML, which is a full markup language. I recommend seeing Doug's presentations on JavaScript (http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=111593&fr=).
The really cool part is how jQuery selects objects. I've been working with CSS for about a year and a half, and I know my way around CSS. The way jQuery identifies an object is by its CSS property. For example, if a Div with the id of of MyDiv, then you could reference that in jQuery like this: $("#MyDiv"). Then you can manipulate it, add text to it, add HTML to it, show, hide, and so many more functions.
In conclusion, USE jQUERY! (Or we can use it for you :) ) jQuery will really help your JavaScript. You will most likely write LESS and do MORE!