Question

I am reading JavaScript and JQuery, The Missing Manual

and they start of with this Snippet :

$(document).ready(function(){});

I know that function(){} is an anonymous function, and that document is an object with properties I can set / read, and that ready() is a JQuery function defined in the library, but I don’t know what the rest of the syntax is for and it is not explained in the book.

Particularly,

$(document)

Can someone explain what this does or point me to a link? Also, someone said that you can identify JQuery by this alone, is this true?

Answer 1

$(document) wraps a jQuery instance around the document object. ($ is just an alias for jQuery.) So the return value of $(document) is a jQuery instance, which has a ready function on it.