What is the difference between a dollar sign and a dollar sign followed by a period in JQuery?

Question

In jQuery, what is the difference between $ and $.? Please provide a practical explanation if possible.

Answer 1

I presume you are asking about the syntactic difference between $('#selector'); and $.parseJSON(str);.

The former is an invocation of a function called $ and the latter invokes it's method called parseJSON. Yup, functions can have methods - it is possible because Javascript functions are also objects. Figuratively speaking: