I think everyone's being a bit too harsh on the author here. For one, there's evidently a great bit of teaching material here, perfect for programmers who have

I think everyone's being a bit too harsh on the author here. For one, there's evidently a great bit of teaching material here, perfect for programmers who have started with jQuery and want to understand a bit more about javascript and how both work. Second, as hackers, many of us find value in simply understanding how things work, practising various techniques, etc. without there necessarily being an end production deliverable. Finally, there are clearly some cases (some kinds of embedded programming, maybe?) where the overheads of a general-purpose library may be too great, and bypassing it is preferable, particularly if a specific user agent can be targeted (or ignored!). So, yeah, no-one should just chuck jQuery away and start coding everything from scratch, but neither should we altogether dismiss a series of articles that has clearly been put together with some care and effort.