Improve your jQuery - 25 excellent tips

http://www.tvidesign.co.uk/blog/improve-your-jquery-25-excellent-tips.aspx

Query is awesome. I've been using it for about a year now and although I was impressed to begin with I'm liking it more and more the longer I use it and the more I find out about it's inner workings.

I'm no jQuery expert. I don't claim to be, so if there are mistakes in this article then feel free to correct me or make suggestions for improvements.

I'd call myself an "intermediate" jQuery user and I thought some others out there could benefit from all the little tips, tricks and techniques I've learned over the past year. The article also ended up being a lot longer than I thought it was going to be so I'll start with a table of contents so you can skip to the bits you're interested in.

Table of Contents

•   1.  Load the framework from Google Code
•   2.  Use a cheat sheet
•   3.  Combine all your scripts and minify them
•   4.  Use Firebug's excellent console logging facilities
•   5.  Keep selection operations to a minimum by caching
•   6.  Keep DOM manipulation to a minimum
•   7.  Wrap everything in a single element when doing any kind of DOM insertion
•   8.  Use IDs instead of classes wherever possible
•   9.  Give your selectors a context
• 10.  Use chaining properly
• 11.  Learn to use animate properly
• 12.  Learn about event delegation
• 13.  Use classes to store state
• 14.  Even better, use jQuery's internal data() method to store state
• 15.  Write your own selectors
• 16.  Streamline your HTML and modify it once the page has loaded
• 17.  Lazy load content for speed and SEO benefits
• 18.  Use jQuery's utility functions
• 19.  Use noconflict to rename the jquery object when using other frameworks
• 20.  How to tell when images have loaded
• 21.  Always use the latest version
• 22.  How to check if an element exists
• 23.  Add a JS class to your HTML attribute
• 24.  Return 'false' to prevent default behaviour
• 25.  Shorthand for the ready event