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

In the context of jQuery, $ refers to the global jQuery object.

$. by itself is invalid JavaScript. As $ is an object, methods on this object are called like on any other object: $.methodname().

Maybe it becomes clearer by substituting $ with jQuery: jQuery.methodname().