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Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP

By Quentin Zervaas

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Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action [Ajax]

By Dave Crane, Bear Bibeault, Tom Locke

Media: Book (Paperback, 544 pages)
ISBN: 1933988037
Publisher: Manning Publications
Release Date: Mar 21, 2007

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Product Description

"This book should rightly be considered the bible of Prototype and Scriptaculous."
-- JavaLobby

Prototype and Scriptaculous are libraries that extend standard Ajax. They make it easier to program Ajax and provide powerful features like drag and drop and animation. In this book, developers learn by playing and see how the libraries work in the real world.

As experience with Ajax increases, developers want the standard Ajax capabilities they repeatedly use to be preprogrammed for them--and that's exactly what Ajax libraries do for them. They reduce the pain of handling cross-browser inconsistencies, they add useful language features, and provide sophisticated functionality. Of these, Prototype is the most popular JavaScript and Ajax framework for low-level user interface features such as animation, drag and drop, and pre-built widgets. Together, they free the developer up to concentrate on building the application. They make a rich user experience easy to achieve.

This book guides the reader through the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries feature-by-feature. In just 350 pages, readers will find over 100 small working examples to help them explore the libraries. As well, they will develop a web-based image gallery that teacher them how to use Prototype and Scriptaculous in the real-world.

The material didn't make sense to me

The outline and concepts of the first few chapters are solid - repurpose an old-fashioned web app into a modern Ajax one. However the example code had a funny smell to it - duplicate code, unclear variable names, etc. I pressed on anyway but found myself reading pages over and over again that still didn't make sense. I kept thinking "there has to be a simpler explanation for this" and finally gave up and returned the book around Chapter 3. There are books out there that explain Prototype and Scriptaculous more clearly. I recommend using the "Look inside this book" feature to see if the writing and coding style make sense to you before plunking down the cash.

Submitted 1 Jun 2009

Excellent Work!!!

I really cannot add much to what other reviewers have already said. This book is, simply put, excellent. It covers prototype and scriptaculous libraries very thoroughly by illustrating various features with relevant examples. Server-side technologies used in some examples use either Java or PHP. No prior experience is required with Java/PHP as enough detail on instructions for running the examples is included in this book. Editors seem to have done a very good job - I could not find any significant errors that are too often presented in some programming books. By reading through the chapters in the book, you can quickly identify areas in your application that can utilize these two libraries. Scratch pad application included in the source code turns to be a nice way to test your own code. I tried the examples and they work as expected.I was once fearful of writing javascript and this book has made it much more palatable and interesting. Highly recommended.

Submitted 21 Jul 2008

Verbose wording, shallow details, & simple examples

Overkill/ repetitive explanations of simple codes and examples. I would recommend reading "Prototype & Scriptaculous" published by the "Pragmatic Programmers" instead - they consistently publish concise, detailed books that are highly rated by readers.

Submitted 24 Mar 2008

Some Basic Errors, but Generally a Good Tutorial

I was looking for a good intro to Scriptaculous and Prototype and this books is pretty good. There are a few irritating things, however. First, the visual illustrations for Chapter 8 are completely wrong. There is a new Chapter 8 posted on the book website.

Second, while some of the code is included in the download (also available from the site), not all is - especially all of the "snippets" which take up all of Chapters 8-11. While most of the "snippets" are under 50 lines of code, it is still annoying - especially when they provide a scratchpad application specifically to run the snippets.

Overall, the problems are not deal-killers, they just show a lack of attention to detail on the part of the book team.

Submitted 23 Dec 2007

Exactly what I hoped for, and more

I'm not even halfway through this book yet and I'm already satisfied with my purchase. I look forward to reading about Scriptaculous, but to me the book is already worth it for (a) the treatment of JavaScript in general and the details on object-oriented JavaScript, JSON, and especially JavaScript prototypes and function closures, (b) Prototype, especially how prototype extends JavaScript itself by modifying various object prototypes, and (c) AJAX, including historical perspective, details and gotchas of AJAX request/response versus traditional GET or POST via browser, and the utilities Prototype offers to ease AJAX communication. Additionally, I know this book will make a great reference for it's coverage of the DOM basics and it's appendices on HTTP basics and traffic. There's even some useful contrasting of different server-side options (PHP versus servlets/JSP, etc.) I don't mean to sound like I'm fawning over this book but it's exactly what I hoped to find after working for the first time with all these technologies on a recent project; I wish I'd had this book during that project.

Submitted 11 Oct 2007