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Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This! (Pragmatic Programmers)

By Christophe Porteneuve

Media: Book (Paperback, 436 pages)
ISBN: 1934356018
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
Release Date: Dec 17, 2007

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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.

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.

Submitted 30 Sep 2008

Excellent Pragmatic Introduction

I set out to read this book from start to finish to understand what the Prototype and Script.aculo.us libraries were about, but before I could I found myself needing to use them, and the book was an extremely useful resource. The book compliments the online resources nicely, explaining not just what to do, but why, and how to do things best. This book does an excellent job of straddling the line between reference and introduction. The writing style is readable enough that you can read a few chapters just to get a sense of what to do, while at the same time, terse enough that you can find what you need quickly. If you are using JavaScript, get this book to help yourself from re-inventing things.

Submitted 19 Sep 2008

Good reference but not a learning book

I learn best by example, and this book has a but a precious few. Most of the book is a glorified API documentation. I was really looking for a book with a lot of ajax examples ( or even non ajax ones ) but it seems this book does not fit the bill.

Submitted 13 Sep 2008

Starts Without Explanation

I approached this book with the expectation that it would teach me in the traditional gradual fashion. You start with some accessible portion and build on the rest. Well, he just starts out of the blocks at a full dash--full complexity--and you really don't know where to begin to understand what he's showing you. So, though I'm sure I could have taken some of his examples and used them, I feel like I did not really get an understanding of the WHY you do it this or that way. So, the ironic effect is that you will benefit the most from this book if you already know how to use these libraries. If you have never used them, then you will be on your own. So, this is NOT an introductory book.
Frankly, I have a good ten years experience using JavaScript and walking the DOM. So, I know my way around client-side scripting. I just felt like the introductory chapters were missing. You're expected to jump right into the hard-core stuff with no buildup, no gradual accumulation of the basics of this library. He was trying to prove how cool the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries were and so he skipped the actual bones of the book. He skipped to the end and omitted the buildup. Buy this book wtih that caveat, in my opinion.

Submitted 6 Jun 2008

Great Prototype Reference

'Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!' is a wonderful reference for learning how to use Prototype and writing better and more powerful Javascript code. Pragmatic has a history of publishing good books that are full of stuff and not fluff and this book follows in that tradition. After reading this book you will learn more about this efficient library that makes things easier for web developers, doing things like dragging and dropping, autocomplete code, and event handling that is better than ever before!

Content is spread over 400 pages and 20 chapters. The writing is solid and right to the point.

If you are a Javascript programmer that is looking for a better way to do things, pick up this book and enjoy.

***** RECOMMENDED

Submitted 2 May 2008