jQuery vs. javascript?

It's all about performance and development speed. Of course, if you are a good programmer and design something that is really tailored to your needs, you might achieve better performance than if you had used a Javascript framework. But do you have the time to do it all by yourself?

My personal opinion is that Javascript is incredibly useful and overused, but that if you really need it, a framework is the way to go.

Now comes the choice of the framework. For what benchmarks are worth, you can find one at http://ejohn.org/files/142/ . It also depends on which plugins are available and what you intend to do with them. I started using jQuery because it seemed to be maintained and well featured, even though it wasn't the fastest at that moment. I do not regret it but I didn't test anything else since then.

Jquery like any other good JavaScript frameworks supplies you with functionality independent of browser platform wrapping all the intricacies, which you may not care about or don't want to care about.

I think using a framework is better instead of using pure JavaScript and doing all the stuff from scratch, unless you usage is very limited.

I definitely recommend JQuery!

Thanks

Personally i think you should learn the hard way first. It will make you a better programmer and you will be able to solve that one of a kind issue when it comes up. After you can do it with pure JavaScript then using jQuery to speed up development is just an added bonus.

If you can do it the hard way then you can do it the easy way, it doesn't work the other way around. That applies to any programming paradigm.