Calling your own functions from jQuery

I've been playing around with jQuery for a week or so, without any prior experience with Javascript. jQuery is absolutely brilliant and it's quite easy to do different things with it. However, when I started doing repetitive tasks, i wanted to create a function to do it; instead of repeating my code at multiple places.

This is where I had problems, because my 'updateTable' function had no idea what $() was and no jQuery functions worked after I started calling my 'updateTable' function from the jQuery context.

Well, today I got it to work by sending the jQuery object to my function.

Old function (does not work)

function updateTable () {
/* Call jQuery stuff (for example, change forms) */
}

$(function() {
$(document).ready(function() {
updateTable();
});
});

After spending a couple of days scratching my head and reading a bit about Javascript, this was 'obviously' a problem of my function not knowing the jQuery context or any of the objects inside it.

There is probably a smarter way of doing this; but I at least solved my problem by appending the jQuery object '$' to the function, as follows.

New, less crappy version

function updateTable ($) {
/* Call jQuery stuff (for example, change forms) */
}

$(function() {
$(document).ready(function() {
updateTable($);
});
});

Update: Arnórs' suggestion

Arnór suggested that declaring the functions after $(document).ready will make all functions after that aware of the jQuery object (makes sense, but I haven't tried it).

$(function() {
$(document).ready(function() {
function updateTable ($) {
/* Call jQuery stuff (for example, change forms) */
}
updateTable();
});
});

Update: Guðmundur suggested creating a jQuery plugin

I decided to go with this advice everything is working so far. I recommend this article as well.

$(function() {
$.fn.updateCart = function() {
/* Misc jQuery stuff */
};
$(document).ready(function() {
('#mytable').updateTable();
});
});

As a footnote; I'm no Javascript or Jquery expert. Been playing around for a week and I found this information extremely hard to come by, so if it can help anyone else who's beginning to play with jQuery, then great..