<p>I have a very simple jQuery Datepicker calendar:</p>

<pre><code>$(document).ready(function(){
    $("#date_pretty").datepicker({ 
    });
});
</code></pre>

<p>and of course in the HTML...</p>

<pre><code>&lt;input type="text" size="10" value="" id="date_pretty"/&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>Today's date is nicely highlighted for the user when they bring up the calendar, but how do I get jQuery to pre-populate the textbox itself with today's date on page load, without the user doing anything?  99% of the time, the today's date default will be what they want.</p>

```
```
var myDate = new Date();
var prettyDate =(myDate.getMonth()+1) + '/' + myDate.getDate() + '/' +
        myDate.getFullYear();
$("#date_pretty").val(prettyDate);
```
```
seemed to work, but there might be a better way out there..