Ruby on Rails

I wanna render to an element instead of redirecting so went back to my book Agile Web Development with Rails adding ajax it says to make my link remote: true and put a respond_to js in my controller and then use a js.erb file Is that a little dated I've been doing some jquery by including *.js files in assets/javascripts Can I render my views to the element using jquery instead of js.erb I notice rails doesn't generate any js.erb files by default Should I do as the book says or find a way to do it with jquery? thanks ia