What JavaScript Is Good For
Part of making this choice is asking what you want to do with JavaScript. Let’s consider vanilla JavaScript. No framework; just plain old JS. JavaScript gives you native objects like Strings, Numbers, Functions, Arrays, Dates, Regular Expressions, and more. JavaScript also gives you an inheritance model – a somewhat esoteric model called prototypal inheritance (which I’ll talk about more later). These building blocks and the concept of inheritance are the bread and butter of any programming language and they have absolutely nothing to do with browsers or the web or CSS or HTML. You could write anything you wanted to in JavaScript. Tic-tac-toe, chess, photoediting, a web server, whatever. It just so happens that 99% of all the JavaScript out there is run in browsers and that’s what we think of it as. The programming language for browsers.
Understanding that the browser, the DOM, is just where we happen to use JS most of the time but that it’s actually a very robust and expressive programming language will help you understand the difference between MooTools and jQuery.
Read the rest at jqueryVSmootools.com