When should I use jQuery's document.ready function?
In simple words,
$(document).readyis an event which fires up whendocumentis ready.
Suppose you have placed your jQuery code in head section and trying to access a dom element (an anchor, an img etc), you will not be able to access it because html is interpreted from top to bottom and your html elements are not present when your jQuery code runs.
To overcome this problem, we place every jQuery/javascript code (which uses DOM) inside $(document).ready function which gets called when all the dom elements can be accessed.
And this is the reason, when you place your jQuery code at the bottom (after all dom elements, just before </body>) , there is no need for $(document).ready
There is no need to place on method inside $(document).ready only when you use on method on document because of the same reason I explained above.
//No need to be put inside $(document).ready
$(document).on('click','a',function () {
})
// Need to be put inside $(document).ready if placed inside <head></head>
$('.container').on('click','a',function () {
});
EDIT
From comments,
$(document).readydoes not wait for images or scripts. Thats the big difference between$(document).readyand$(document).loadOnly code that accesses the DOM should be in ready handler. If it's a plugin, it shouldn't be in the ready event.
Answers:
jQuery's .on() method: I use the .on() method for AJAX quite a bit (dynamically creating DOM elements). Should the .on() click handlers always be inside document.ready?
No, not always. If you load your JS in the document head you will need to. If you are creating the elements after the page loads via AJAX, you will need to. You will not need to if the script is below the html element you are adding a handler too.
Performance: Is it more performant to keep various javascript/jQuery objects inside or outside document.ready (also, is the performance difference significant?)?
It depends. It will take the same amount of time to attach the handlers, it just depends if you want it to happen immediately as the page is loading or if you want it to wait until the entire doc is loaded. So it will depend what other things you are doing on the page.
Object scope: AJAX-loaded pages can't access objects that were inside the prior page's document.ready, correct? They can only access objects which were outside document.ready (i.e., truly "global" objects)?
It's essentially it's own function so it can only access vars declared at a global scope (outside/above all functions) or with window.myvarname = '';
Before you can safely use jQuery you need to ensure that the page is in a state where it's ready to be manipulated. With jQuery, we accomplish this by putting our code in a function, and then passing that function to $(document).ready(). The function we pass can just be an anonymous function.
$(document).ready(function() {
console.log('ready!');
});
This will run the function that we pass to .ready() once the document is ready. What's going on here? We're using $(document) to create a jQuery object from our page's document, and then calling the .ready() function on that object, passing it the function we want to execute.
Since this is something you'll find yourself doing a lot, there's a shorthand method for this if you prefer — the $() function does double duty as an alias for $(document).ready() if you pass it a function:
$(function() {
console.log('ready!');
});
This is a good reading: Jquery Fundamentals