jQuery in Action

Chapter 6. jQuery utility functions

This chapter covers

• The jQuery browser detection flags
• Using other libraries with jQuery
• Functions for manipulating arrays
• Extending and merging objects
• Dynamically loading new script

Up to this point, we’ve spent a fair number of chapters examining jQuery commands—the term that we’ve applied to methods that operate upon a set of DOM elements wrapped by the $() function. But you may recall that way back in chapter 1, we also introduced the concept of utility functions—functions namespaced by $ that don’t operate on a wrapped set. These functions could be thought of as top-level functions except that they are defined on the $ instance rather than window.

Generally, these functions either operate upon JavaScript ...