Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!

by Christophe Porteneuve

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1934356018
• ISBN13: 9781934356012
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
• Length: 426 Pages
• Weight: 1.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.6" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Christophe Hits a Home Run

If you have some Javascript experience, have hit the cross browser issues, and now are looking for the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries to take away some of the pain then this is a great book for you. Christophe takes you through the entirety of the API with a very readable book. When a new method is introduced short examples are given that show not only how to use the call but also provide the context of how the functionality might be used in a real world web application. Christophe often explains why a particular technique is needed and explains the cross browser issue that it works around. This book also amazingly teaches some tricky Javascript concepts extremely well. For example, this book has a section explaining binding loss in Javascript that is better than anything I have read anywhere else. Also, Christophe apparently teaches at a University and it shows in the writing style - the end of each chapter has a really nice "what we learned" summary that really wraps things up nicely - if you need quick insight into what a particular piece of the API offers I would recommend heading to these "what we learned" summaries for a quick review. In summary I recommend this book highly for the Javascripter with a Javascript foundation looking to take things to the next level with Prototype and Scriptaculous.

Worth it alone for the Prototype section

This book builds upon the existing Prototype documentation found at http://prototypejs.org/api by putting the API in context. Other than the fact it uses Ruby for the server side examples (I'm sure everyone who reads it will have a differing opinion there), I have to say it was one of the most helpful programming books I've read. The short usage examples that were neatly tucked into the text were very useful and I found myself reading it almost like a novel and able to soak everything in without needing to download or code them out. I began using Prototype during the middle of last year when it was in version 1.5. There are many welcomed updates in v1.6 and the author does a good job of filling the reader in on the important changes. I recommend this book to anyone who might have dabbled in Prototype and is looking to take it to the next level. I also think others like myself will benefit who have been using v1.5 and are looking for a good excuse to stay up to date with the framework. Oh and it covers Scriptaculous too which is great because the web documentation is seriously lacking compared to Prototype and jQuery

Pragmatic Prototype Indeed

Reading this little piece of work is a great way to very quickly learn the nuts and bolts of Prototype and Scriptaculous. This book is long on code and short on deep explanation and banter (for better or worse; hence "pragmatic programmer"). My background: I'm not a ruby programmer. I program in ASP.NET and I recently accepted a job where I needed to quickly learn prototype. When I settled on this I didn't realize that, along with choosing an intro book, I was also choosing a Prototype/Scriptaculous coding cookbook. I couldn't tell you how many times the authors displayed a line of code and I analyzed the code for a moment then thought "A ha!" because they demonstrated a clean and concise way to do exactly what I needed to do. Segments of code that I had written that were 25 lines code be shortened to 3 or 4 due to their examples. In javascript the less code that needs to be downloaded to the client the better, so obviously any code reduction w/o affecting performance is a good thing. My only criticism is perhaps the authors might have added a touch more coding explanations for complex code. Sometimes I would read a line of code and be totally lost as to how it functioned (which is essential if you want to reproduce said code on your own), and there would be little in way of explanation in the book. I quickly overcame this by supplementing the reading with the online documentation, which explained any prototype methods which might not have been thoroughly explained by the authors. I should probably iterate that this happened relatively few times overall.

Now I Use Prototype

I had heard of Prototype before, but had not begun using it until this book. I bought it after seeing the recommendation on the official Prototype site and I am glad I did. Book provided an excellent learning pace, practical examples, and an extensive resource in a very concise and easily readable way. Good buy for a developer's collection!

For beginners and experts alike

This book goes deep into Prototype and Scriptaculous' wonders. Follow some good code examples of draggables and slidables and other JavaScript special effects. Learn how they work and how to make them look splendid. Following the advice in this book you'll aquire some serious JavaScript-fu, making your code clear, concise, unobtrusive, working in all browsers and achieve wonders very fast. Overall a very handy book to have near whenever a JavaScript task comes up.