I've been looking at a bunch of the new javascript libraries.
Although many are nice, jQuery is the first that has lodged itself inextricably into my brain, providing a set of tools that, were I NOT to use jQuery, I would inevitably look for in any other library or re-write for my own use.
The
jQuery core documentation.
Available
jQuery plugins
jQuery plugin authoring guide
The approach of the jQuery core is "make it real easy to get things from the DOM" and "make it real easy to do things with them". It soups up DOM programming to a mind numbing degree, and it's focused squarely on developers who already know what they are doing.
Many of the plugins depart from this and are more about canned effects and making things easy to do out of the box.
Al of this should be caveated with: I have not used this yet to take something live at my place of work, where demands for perfection and wide browser support are quite high. I have done a bunch of prototyping with it and will continue to use it for that and for my personal site (not coincedentally, in both environments I can ignore IE6).
Dated: 02/13/2007