Getting a value from JQuery .each()

I struggled mightily trying to get an attribute out of what gets returned from the JQuery .each() function, but eventually tried this and it works:

 <td id="skill_0_ranks" skill_id="0" align="right">0a</td>  
 // update skill mods  
 $('td[skill_id]').each(function(i, element){  
  skill_id = $(element).attr('skill_id')  
  update_skill(skill_id)  
 })  

Incidentally, found a cool site for code formatting: http://codeformatter.blogspot.com/2009/06/about-code-formatter.html