To those who have been accustomed to the difficulties and dangers of a sea-faring life, there are no lines which speak more forcibly to the imagination, or prove the beauty and power of the Greek poet, than those in the noble prayer of Ajax:"Lord of earth and air,O king! O father! hear my humble prayer.Dispel this cloud, that light of heaven restore;Give me to see - and Ajax asks no more,If Greece must perish - we Thy will obey;But let us perish in the face of day!

In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.

I recognized the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, 'To my beloved Hector,' and I thought, by God she's cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not far off the mark.

jQuery is by far the most widely used library for JavaScript. It is used on more than 50% of websites. Many frameworks, such as Backbone and Twitter’s Bootstrap, are built on top of jQuery. Being able to extend and write plugins for jQuery can not only save lots of time, but also makes code much cleaner and easier to maintain.

believe the power of jQuery is highly underutilized. Most developers will take advantage of its shortcuts and CSS selectors, but most of the time they fail to take advantage of much else. Being able to extend jQuery, whether by adding your own functions, CSS selectors or full-blown plugins, makes you a much stronger and smarter developer.

Reusability is key in reducing bugs and coding quickly. The more I use a piece of code, the more confident and familiar I become with it, which in turn significantly speeds up my development time.

In my experience, requirements change quite often, or new situations will arise that weren’t anticipated at the start of the project. If the situation can be addressed with a plugin, I just whip open the standalone plugin page, make the updates and pop the new plugin back in. Because the plugin is self-contained, it’s easy to recreate the problem, fix it, and get it back into the codebase.

Ultimately, I try to think of my application’s main codebase as just stringing together various components and code from many sources. It just controls logic and flow. The real nitty-gritty is handled behind the scenes. This is why frameworks like Backbone are so important — they hide a lot of the details in the background and allow you to just focus on the flow and control of your application.

A good standalone plugin can also make you a fair amount of money. Many developers make a decent living by simply maintaining and updating one or two crucial plugins that are far better than anything available for free.