Learning jQuery

JonBob and I have been working on a TextMate bundle for jQuery over the past few weeks. If you're not familiar with TextMate and you own a Mac, you should definitely check it out. It has saved me countless hours of repetitive keystrokes with its bundles, which contain commands, code snippets, templates, and macros that are triggered by pressing special key combinations or clicking menu items.

The jQuery bundle that we put together mostly consists of "tab triggers" for various functions, but it also includes context-sensitive help derived from the online documentation and some nice syntax highlighting. After selecting jQuery as your file type in TextMate, you could, for example, type ready and press the Tab key to produce this:

$(document).ready(function() {
  // Stuff to do as soon as the DOM is ready;
});

It'll then select the commented line (line 2 in this example) for you so you can start typing right away, replacing the comment with your code. Hit the Tab key once more and it drops you onto a new line below the closing brackets. If you want to learn more about a function that you've typed in, just click anywhere inside its name and press Control + H. You'll get official documentation on the function.

Get the Bundle

So, how can you get this cool jQuery bundle and speed up your coding? First, you'll need TextMate, of course. If you don't have it yet, download the 30-day trial. Then you'll need to either check out the bundles from the Subversion repository (advanced) or download and install the GetBundles bundle.