As some of you have come to see, I'm a very big fan of Ajax and even more so of JQuery. But getting up to speed in Ajax can be a daunting task for even the most seasoned developers as you're dealing with nuances that sometimes feel beyond your control. Whether its XHR, DOM, CSS or XHTML, there are a lot of pieces to the Ajax puzzle that need to be addressed in order to make things work correctly.
The good thing is that many of the frameworks out there really do help to minimize the pain of getting into RIA development and while I always recommend getting familiar with the plumbing of how Ajax works, sometimes you just want to get going and be productive. Frameworks and libraries, such as JQuery will help you do just that. So here's a couple of links to get you up to speed on JQuery and start producing some really cool effects for your sites:
Visual jQuery Magazine(PDF)
Learning JQuery
Getting Started with JQuery
Simple jQuery Tutorial
15 Days of jQuery
These are the sites that I used to get up to speed on JQuery and I found them invaluable.
