>now that is a line encouraging you to be fluent in, not with javascript ;-)

It's actually easy if you know a few things about jQuery:

- every selector function returns a collection of objects
- every function which does something to a collection of objects returns that collection
- other functions return attributes
- functions can be chained, i.e. if one returns a collection, then you can just append .anotherFunction() and it will be executed on the result of the previous function

So... $("some selector") returns a collection of objects (probably just one in this case)

$("some selector").val("some text") sets that text as a .value of the object(s)

$("some selector").val("some text").val() gets that value

And then you get the values of these concatenated as ordinary strings.