I'd argue that jQuery embraces a lot of ideas that new JS programmers often overlook - functions as objects for example. jQuery also gives you primitives to pe

I'd argue that jQuery embraces a lot of ideas that new JS programmers often overlook - functions as objects for example. jQuery also gives you primitives to perform functional/set based operations. For me, approaching JS as a functional language has been the key to writing good clean JS. jQuery helped me with this by allowing me to ignore all the psuedo OO stuff in JS and concentrate on the functional features.