I'm not submitting this as a flamebait. On the contrary, I'm fairly interested about HNers opinions about how these frameworks compare. I have little to nothing front end experience(and want to learn a JS framework). In my inexperienced view MooTools seems cleaner, but jQuery it's way more popular.
If you haven't done a lot of JavaScript front end programming, I'd recommend jquery. You'll spend considerable time just learning about the DOM and how to select and modify the nodes of your dynamic HTML content. and jquery is basically just a thin JavaScript DSL for doing that. So there's no big overhead you have to learn at the same time and most tutorials and examples target just what you'll find yourself doing in the beginning.
Once you feel comfortable playing around and adding minor effects (week or two), you might want to build bigger applications -- which is where a lot of non-jquery frameworks see their raison d'etre, by making it more obvious how to structure your applications. Some people don't even get that far, as they might do a lot on the backend level and are perfectly satisfied with jquery's innate abilities and that of some plugins provided.
So I wouldn't hurry things. If you find yourself in need of a framework for bigger apps and/or more organization with your co-workers, browse through some of the "heavier" framework at that time. Take a look at MooTools, YUI3, but also at things like knockout, backbone and JavaScriptMVC.(Maybe even SproutCore or Cappuccino)
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 26.0 ms ] threadOnce you feel comfortable playing around and adding minor effects (week or two), you might want to build bigger applications -- which is where a lot of non-jquery frameworks see their raison d'etre, by making it more obvious how to structure your applications. Some people don't even get that far, as they might do a lot on the backend level and are perfectly satisfied with jquery's innate abilities and that of some plugins provided.
So I wouldn't hurry things. If you find yourself in need of a framework for bigger apps and/or more organization with your co-workers, browse through some of the "heavier" framework at that time. Take a look at MooTools, YUI3, but also at things like knockout, backbone and JavaScriptMVC.(Maybe even SproutCore or Cappuccino)