I’m one to scoff at development tools/libraries which purport to make my like easier. Call me a masochist, but something in my head associates “easy” with “anybody can do it”.

I’m also one to get predictions horribly wrong, and the camps that I choose to align with (most notably in the TV sci-fi genre…) have been been known to get beat down by a difference of opinion or a lack of general interest on the part of society at large.

So it was that I heard of Javascript libraries like Prototype and jQuery, but I never paid them any mind. Big mistake. Having seen the latter library mentioned on all sorts of career-development sites, I decided to take a closer look.  And the result, I’m glad to say, is that I’m quite impressed and very likely to rely heavily on jQuery in the future.

It’s not that jQuery lets me do things in Javascript that I couldn’t do otherwise. Rather, jQuery lets me take mountains of code that performs some function and replace it with one or two lines which perform the same function. It really amounts to a shorthand version of Javascript, such that you still have to know what you’re doing in JS before you can use the shorthand.

Admittedly jQuery also lets you do cool things like perform animations. But from somebody who has written my fair share of Javascript animation functions, take it from me when I say that making a simple jQuery call to animate an element is a welcome relief, particularly when you have to consider browser inconsistencies.

So that’s it then – I’m adding jQuery to my recent spate of new undertakings.