APEX

I was blundering along cluelessly trying to bind event handlers using jquery, wherein I was missing a step (the ready function doh!) , and in researching that I found out that there were examples floating around using a different construct than the jquery book would use:

jquery book:

$(function() 
  {$('#MYELEMENT')
       .bind('click',function(event) 
           {
            alert ('hey I caught one');
            }
      )
  }
  );

some examples here and there:
[http://www.danielmcghan.us/2010/05/new-region-events-in-apex-4-this-is.html]

which is doing something akin to this:

apex.jQuery(document).ready(function(){
 etc 

ok so what is the significance of using "apex.jQuery(document).ready"
versus the other way? should I be converting all my ready functions that I've already stuck in there to this other
format? Am I risking some kind of disaster? (If so this should be in the faq).