[kolme]

Also with all my respects to mr. Resig, but this is not really code to learn from. It's full of bad habits and it's hard to read. Poorly named, mostly uncommented and pretty hacky.

Not really judging, it was just a bunch of handy hacks he had for personal use.

Another reason it's hard to follow is of course: writing a CSS selector is not a trivial task, and that with all the browser quirks workarounds. I'm sure getting it working properly wasn't a walk in the park.

That said, he often talks about how he wanted to make the code look "cute" by making it as compact as possible and to save weight. Although weigh matters a lot in the web, the source code is a terrible place to optimize. Instead, write readable code, with sensible names, and then compact it with tools.

[jeresig]

I completely agree. I tried to make a bunch of notes on the (poor) code quality, inline. This is mostly an attempt at archaeology, if you will. Naturally the current release (or even 1.0 release) of jQuery is substantially better code in every respect.

[marrs]

    this is not really code to learn from

I used to work with someone who could look over my shoulder, read and evaluate my code, and then tell me where my bug was within seconds. He knew the code better than I did, and I'd written it! I asked him about this mad skill of his and he directed me to easily the worst programme I've ever read in my entire life. [1]

It was a block of unformatted, uncommented, dangerously typecast old-style C, with meaningless single letter names for variables and functions.

So I read it. It took a lot of study and I didn't cheat and run it through a pretty printer. I never really got to the point where I grokked it but my ability to read other code has improved a lot.

So whilst I agree that it's important to write code in the way you describe, I think it's well worth reading code that takes you out of your comfort zone from time to time.

[1] http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm

[joshuahutt]

> and then compact it with tools.

Did we have minification tools back then?

[kolme]

Jepp: http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html