The jQuery website provides a large repository of available plugins at http://plugins.jquery.com/, with features such as user ratings, versioning, and bug reporting. Many of the plugins listed in this Plugin Repository have links to demos, example code, and tutorials to help us get started. Many more plugins can be found in the general code repositories such as GitHub (http://github.com/) and on plugin developers' personal sites. On GitHub we can often get a sense of the quality, or at least the popularity, of a plugin by examining its commit history and by noting how many developers are "watching" it and how many have "forked" it.
If we can't find the answers to all of our questions in the Plugin Repository, GitHub, the author's website, or the plugin's comments, then we can always turn to the jQuery community for assistance. The jQuery forums include a dedicated area for discussion of using plugins at http://forum.jquery.com/using-jquery-plugins. Many of the plugin...