Product Description

Tired of getting swamped in the nitty-gritty of cross-browser, Web 2.0-grade JavaScript? Get back in the game with Prototype and script.aculo.us, two extremely popular JavaScript libraries, that make it a walk in the park. Be it AJAX, drag and drop, auto-completion, advanced visual effects, or many other great features, all you need is write one or two lines of script that look so good they could almost pass for Ruby code!

Web applications are getting richer and richer, with more interaction baked in every day. But JavaScript, DOM, CSS and a full host of other Web standards are quite complex, and the result isn't always browser compliant.

The Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries are veritable treasure troves, smoothing over all the usual nitty-gritty differences between browsers, and making most common features a breeze to implement. With this book, you can quickly wield the whole power of these extraordinary libraries.

Dive into Prototype, the library that makes JavaScript so much more powerful, and it looks a lot like Ruby code. Exploring the DOM, handling events, taming AJAX, and radically simplifying most of your scripting code: it all becomes easy-and very portable-with Prototype.

When it comes to advanced UI features, script.aculo.us is every web developer's dream come true: whether you need to create auto-completed text inputs, implement in-place editors, provide customized drag-and-drop behaviors, capture your users' attention with visual effects or simply build DOM fragments more efficiently, it's all there, and lightweight too.

This book guides you through all the details of these features, letting you use many technologies on the server side, such as PHP, vanilla Ruby, and Ruby On Rails, in countless examples illustrating every aspect. Power users will also learn the design philosophies of the libraries, and how to contribute to them and augment them for their own needs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #456886 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 426 pages

About the Author
Christophe Porteneuve has been doing IT R&D for over 10 years, specializing early in Web development. Involved in Ruby and Rails since 2005, and in Prototype and script.aculo.us since 2006, Christophe contributes heavily to them all, is one of the driving forces behind Prototype's official website (http://prototypejs.org), a prominent voice on the support mailing list, and a member of Prototype Core.

Customer Reviews

annoying writing style.
It took me a while to decide which one of the 2 or 3 books on Prototype to choose from. I read the various reviews , compare prices, page numbers,
and then eventually I chose this one. Mainly because I kinda trusted the
"pragmatic programmers" series.

"Wrong Choice I guess."
The book's coverage is poor and the writing style is terribly irritating:
what a waste of words..."
You will read constantly things like:
"by now you should be on the edge of your sit but before we go any further..." "if that isn't cool for an example..."
"if you are wondering what the heck is wrong with this..."
and "one of the reasons is done in this way is because I don't like php"

poor. Very poor.
it gets two stars instead of one ...because I have not finished it yet and
I am assuming it gets better towards the end...

Great book to learn all the "smart" things of Prototype
This book really got me started using all the "smart" things you can do with Prototype.
The book describes all the utility methods (especially $$), objects (especially Form and Element) etc.
It is not a book you read and that's it. I keep returning to it.
Together with the API reference this book really got me started with Prototype.
Today it is about 4 months ago I bought the book, and my JS/Prototype code is now much "smarter" and curtainly shorter than before I got this book.
Conclusion: Buy this book, print the whole Prototype API reference (yes, all 214 pages of version 1.6!), read the book and the API through and through and work with the code. You will not regret it!!!

I have never used the script.aculo.us part of the book, so this review is only about the Prototype part of the book.