If you are concerned about image quality, and do all sorts of post processing, nothing will beat RAW.
RAW has more dynamic range. Jpeg are 8-bit files. 256 brightness to work with. RAW can come in 16bits. That is 65536 levels to play with instead. Many pple will say that it is alright to boost or drop exposure by 1 stop without noticeable degradation in your image.
Camera takes photo > RAW file
for jpeg, Camera takes photo > applies auto white balance, does sharpening of image, noise reduction, make colours richer,etc
Needless to say, RAW definitely have 1000001 advantages over jpeg. You can apply a more accurate white balance, use better sharpening algorithm and noise reduction for superb results.
Now for the cons.
However, because RAW is unprocessed by nature, some find it too much of a hassle to edit EVERY photo painstakingly. Unless you are fine with unsharpened images and the colour that it produces. Shooting in both Jpeg and RAW is a good solution, or you can always decide when to take RAW and when Jpeg will do fine.
Also, RAW files are huge in nature, taking longer to write than Jpeg. They are much larger and you might need to save them as tiff or jpg before you can upload or use them in certain instances because it is not as widely supported. If you have harddisk storage constrains, you might want to be careful because it will fill up space a few times faster.
Having said that, if you are really keen on taking RAW, i will recommend a software that has a seamless and non-destructive RAW(you can undo ALL your changes) workflow that will benefit you.
Try Adobe lightroom or Aperture (if you are using mac OS) because they have native support for RAW and have a very clear and understandable flow for you to work with
I will recommend photoshop if you want to edit more specific photos, but lightroom does a great job, especially with the option to apply changes to a whole batch of photos at one time, and it is a pure photograph editting software. It also has features to batch convert your photos to jpeg or more popular formats to share on flickr or facebook.
Feel free to pm me if you have any questions