I found this snippet when i was looking at jQuery plugins and wonder what it actually does
A jQuery plugin skeleton:
(function($) {
...
})(jQuery);
And more recently in nettuts:
var STICKIES = (function () {
...
}());
This creates a anonymous function and calls it directly: this is equivalent to
var fun = function(){};
fun();
its used in jquery plugins to ensure compatibility with other libraries defining a global variable '$'. in your plugin sekeleton, you wrap your plugin in a anonymous function, which receives an argument named '$' (thus overriding a global variable '$'), this anonymous function is then called with 'jQuery' as parameter, so effectively $ becomes = jQuery, but only within that anonymous function.