I highly encourage you to explore the Modernizr docs in addition to using the examples in these chapters as seeds to grow ideas from. My hope is that by broadly covering all of the principles and practices in as many ways as possible the gears in your head will begin turning and you'll be filled with fresher ways of implementing previous projects as well as new approaches for what lies ahead.
Now that we've about wrapped up our feature detecting, polyfilling fun, I'd like to cover a few resources that are quite helpful and worth checking out. These are just the tip of the iceberg but should get you well on your way to building more solid apps.
The website jQuerysBestFriends.com by Alex Sexton is delivered in slide format and covers just about everything important to building in JavaScript today with a nice side of humor. It is highly recommended to take the time to read through each slide, as well as get a laugh or two as Alex covers an array of practices and principles. You'll walk away more educated and full of great resources in development today.
This is one of the best ways, if not the best, to load JavaScript into your pages and applications. Require JS allows a simple and sanity saving way of loading dependencies as needed in a module centric way. Compare this with the more traditional way of dumping every bit of JavaScript and using only a portion of it as needed. This way you can load only what you need in a manageable ay.
While YepNope/Modernizr.load is useful for a more micro level using tests to conditionally load scripts, this is better suited for the broader picture loading of JavaScript. With an additional plugin, it is also possible to load templates as well.
In addition to the benefit of modularity and loading tools, Require JS comes packaged with a great optimizer for production code builds, including CSS. Find it at RequireJS.org.
Backbone JS is one of my favorite MVC JavaScript frameworks and pairs quite nicely with Require JS and Modernizr. Using Backbone allows you to break up your application into Models, Views, and Collections. Find out more at BackboneJS.org.
Self described as a "utility-belt library for JavaScript", and the "tie to go along with jQuery's tux", this library provides 60 or so functions, many of which are probably more highly optimized versions of those you are already using. This library even has a built-in template utility that picks up where jQuery templates left off. Find out more at UnderscoreJS.org.
Mobile, gaming, or meat and potatoes web development, this site covers it all with practical exercises, advice, and articles on virtually every topic related to the new HTML5 specification. Find out more at Html5rocks.com.
