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 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. 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...

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...

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,...

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...