I am about to embark on a new web project and I plan to put some JavaScripts in the and also some before , using the foll
Javascript should be placed at the end of the document so that it doesn't delay the parallel loading of page elements. This does then require that the js is written in a specific way but it does improve the speed of page loads.
Also, ideally you could host references like this under a different (sub)domain. References to jquery should be pointed to googles CDN too.
See http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html for more info.