What's the difference between '$(this)' and 'this'?

Yes you only need $() when you're using jQuery. If you want jQuery's help to do DOM things just keep this in mind.

$(this)[0] === this

Basically every time you get a set of elements back jQuery turns it into a jQuery object. If you know you only have one result, it's going to be in the first element.

$("#myDiv")[0] === document.getElementById("myDiv");

And so on...

$() is the jQuery constructor function.

this is a reference to the DOM element of invocation.

So basically, in $(this), you are just passing the this in $() as a parameter so that you could call jQuery methods and functions.

Yes, you need $(this) for jQuery functions, but when you want to access basic javascript methods of the element that don't use jQuery, you can just use this.