Question

I feel like I’ve only ever seen this here on SO, but I can’t seem to find any documentation on it. The code I am talking about is stuff like this:

$(function foo(){
    alert('foo');
});

Is there anything to that or is that just something that novices do because they think jQuery is a language? There is no scope change. It just seems completely unnecessary. Is there any method that you can invoke on this like:

$(function foo(){ alert('foo'); }).someMethod();

The closest thing I can think of is $.proxy, but that doesn’t use this syntax. Am I right, is this completely unnecessary?

Answer 1

That’s how you invoke a function after DOM initialization. It’s equivalent to

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

EDIT: From the documentation:

All three of the following syntaxes are equivalent:

 - $(document).ready(handler)
 - $().ready(handler) (this is not recommended)
 - $(handler)

See: http://api.jquery.com/ready/