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But what if you like the jQuery syntax? One way to illustrate the power of MooTools is to show you how easy it is to change it to suit your tastes. If we wanted to implement the hover method from jQuery in MooTools, we could easily do so: (more)

If you look at the things jQuery can do, there’s often a counterpart in MooTools. If you look at the things MooTools can do, there is often no way to emulate it using jQuery code because of jQuery’s focus on the DOM. MooTools has a broader functionality than jQuery, but there’s nothing about jQuery that prevents you from doing those things. For example, jQuery does not come with any sort of inheritance system, but that’s ok. You could, if you want, use the MooTools Class in conjunction with jQuery if you wanted to (or write your own). (more)

And this is why jQuery is more accessible. It doesn’t ask that you learn JavaScript inside and out. It doesn’t throw you into the deep end with prototypal inheritance, binding, “this”, and native prototypes. When you get started with jQuery in its official tutorial, this is the first jQuery code example you find: (more)

Because MooTools focuses on making the JavaScript API itself more stable and coherent, it is focused less on giving you an interface that “changes the way you write JavaScript” and more on making JavaScript as a whole less frustrating; MooTools is an extension to the JavaScript language. MooTools tries to make JavaScript the way it is meant to be. A significant portion of the core library is spent on augmenting Function, String, Array, Number, Element and other prototypes. The other big thing it offers is a function called Class. (more)

Javascript has a special word: “this”. It’s hard for me to succinctly define what “this” is all about but, by default, “this” is the object to which the current method belongs. It allows objects to refer to themselves within their methods as they would otherwise have no means to do so. This becomes important when you create children objects and have numerous instances of that object; how else could the method of an object refer to itself? (more)

The JavaScript programming language has some really awesome things about it. For starters, it’s a functional language, which means that it treats functions as high-order objects that can be passed around as variables just like any other object – strings or numbers for example. It’s designed with this concept in mind and many of the methods and patterns in it work best when you write code this way. It’s the difference between: (more)

If you think of the tasks that we want to accomplish in JavaScript strictly in terms of “get stuff on the page and do stuff to it” then jQuery is probably the best choice. It excels at offering a very expressive system for describing behavior on the page in a way that doesn’t feel like programming sometimes. You can still use the rest of JavaScript to do what you want to do, but if you’re focused on the DOM – changing CSS properties, animating things, fetching content via AJAX, etc – most of what you’ll end up writing will be covered by jQuery, and what isn’t will likely be plain-old JavaScript. (more)