Jquery changes from 1.4.2 to 1.6

jQuery is a powerful library and it is possible to get by without
using any of the new features. 

delegate()

Most people know about live() and how it can be used to attach
listeners to elements that don’t yet exist in the DOM. live() has
a younger brother that was born in 1.4.2 and he is called delegate().
delegate() is more powerful. It gives you more precision in
where to attach the listener.

$('.main-content').find('section').delegate 'p', 'click', ->

  $(this).addClass 'highlight'

As you can see above, delegate(), unlike live(), can be chained like
normal jQuery calls.

jQuery.now(), jQuery.type() and jQuery.parseXML()

Nothing special here, just some utilities that are good to know about.

$.now() is (new Date()).getTime()

$.type('hello') is 'string'

xml = """

"""

xmlDoc = $.parseXML xml

($(xmlDoc).find 'title').text() is 'RSS Title'

All these utilities are interesting, but the truly good thing that came
out of jQuery-1.5+ is Deferred().

Deferred()

With the release of jQuery 1.5 the internal implementation of $.ajax
was changed to use Deferred(), and, even better, the implementation
was deemed so useful, that it became part of the public API.

Here is how you can use it via the $.ajax method.

Declare a function hex that calls the /hex url on the server, which
will return a hex value between 00 and FF.

  hex = ->

    $.ajax { url: '/hex' }

Call the function multiple times, and you get a new Deferred back for
each call. Notice the lack of handlers for the calls.

  red = hex()

  green = hex()

  blue = hex()

Attach handlers to each of the Deferreds to do something useful with
the returned value. Notice the use of done instead of success.
success is deprecated and will be removed in 1.8.

  red.done (hh)->

    $("#r").css 'background-color', "##{hh}0000"

  green.done (hh)->

    $("#g").css 'background-color', "#00#{hh}00"

  blue.done (hh)->

    $("#b").css 'background-color', "#0000#{hh}"

I am not limited to adding one handler, I can attach as many as I like.
Here I attach another one for logging the success of the red-call.

  red.done (hh) ->

    console.log(hh)

If this was all there was to it, I would be happy, but it is not by
using the $.when method I get a new Deferred object that orchestrates
multiple Deferreds in a very simple way. Let me create a color-Deferred
that waits for the others to return and then calls a new callback when
they are all done.

  color = $.when(red, green, blue)

  color.done (r, g, b) ->

    $("#color").css 'background-color', "##{r[0]}#{g[0]}#{b[0]}"

The results from the requests are given in the same order as the
Deferred objects are passed in. The results are given as an array with
three arguments [ data, ‘success’ , deferred ].

Apart from the examples I have shown, there are methods
working with Deferred. Methods for creating, jQuery.Deferred(),
resolving, resolve(), resolveWith(), and rejecting, reject(),
rejectWith().

To attach handlers to the events, you can use done() for resolve,
fail for reject, always() for both resolve and reject. You can also
use then(doneCallback, failCallback) to attach both a done and a
fail handler with one call.

Deferreds are really cool, check them out here