The Little Book on CoffeeScript

External Libraries

Using external libraries is exactly the same as calling functions on CoffeeScript libraries because, at the end of the day, everything is compiled down to JavaScript. Using CoffeeScript with jQuery is especially elegant, due to the amount of callbacks in jQuery’s API:

# Use local alias
$ = jQuery

$ ->
  # DOMContentLoaded
  $(".el").click ->
    alert("Clicked!")

Since all of CoffeeScript’s output is wrapped in an anonymous function, we can set a local $ alias for jQuery. This will make sure that even if jQuery’s no conflict mode is enabled and the $ re-defined, our script will still function as intended.