When doing outdoor activities like trekking, camping, cycling or skiing for example it is important to have the right clothing. Each activity demands another set of equipment, depending on the temperature and the terrain. When trekking you need the right surefooted boots, a good backpack and maybe telescopic sticks. For camping you need additional equipment like tents, sleeping bags, a stove and maybe a folding chair and portable forks, knifes and spoons. And for skiing its important to have quality gloves, caps and a snow suit to keep you warm and dry. But one thing you'll need for almost every outdoor activity is a jacket. Maybe just to keep you warm in higher mountains or in the winter, to prevent you from getting wet in heavy rain or just to keep the wind away. There are so many different types of jackets for all purposes you can imagine.
The easiest one is a simple rain coat. They are made of a simple plastic. The more advanced ones come with a Gore Tex membrane which is breathable in addition to its impermeability to water. A rain coat can be lined with wool for example, to make it also comfortable in colder regions. When talking of rain coats we normally think about long jackets, reaching until the knees, but you can also get shorter ones, which are normally just called rain jackets. When you need really protection against a cloudburst or if you are working in wet areas, you can also get rain pants and a pair of rubber boots to make a complete rain suit.
A rain cape is a common item carried by cyclists. It is the simplest protection against rain you can imagine. It's cut very wide so that it covers the cyclists whole body, the arms until over the handle bar, and also has a hood to protect the whole body. In most times it is made out of cheap plastic and it is not breathable. The problem is that you start to sweat very fast under capes like these, you just can hope that the rain stops soon. But it is still better to have a rain cape, then getting totally soaked.
The most rain jackets also work nice as windbreakers. It doesn't matter if they are made out of goretex or another more simple synthetic, they will hold the wind away. More important for wind jackets is that the zippers are protected with a kind of protecting strip to stop the wind. A simple zipper will not hold the wind out of your jacket, because it is not completely tight.
Another sort of jacket loved by outdoor freaks is the fleece jacket. They are made out of microfleece. The main advantage is that they are highly breathable, and they only hold 1% of their weight in water, what makes it dry very quickly. They are very comfortable to wear and you feel very warm in them. The main disadvantage is that they are not wind and waterproof. But the good thing is that there are combinations of fleece and rain jackets. They use a mechanism which lets you zip the fleece jacket into the rain jacket, so you have a double jackets which combines the advantages of both kinds of jackets.