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

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 436 pages
• Published by: Pragmatic Bookshelf December 17, 2007
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1934356018
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1934356012
• Book Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

Book 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.

About The Author
Christophe Porteneuve has been doing IT R&D for over ten 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.

Reader Reviews
§ The author has a fluid, confident, and even literate writing style that is rare in books of this nature. It is a loss that he did not direct more attention to the motivation behind using these two JavaScript libraries. However, if you are an experienced object-oriented programmer ready for some heads-down JavaScript syntax, this book may be for you. If you need reasons *why* you should be using libraries instead of rolling your own and if you want to know *why* you should be sweating to learn Prototype and script.aculo.us in particular, then this book is not for you. If you like to see code in the context of real Web application situations and challenges, then this book is a heavy slog indeed. You can't help but ask yourself these broader questions when you see the simple drag and drop example. You wonder *why* you would want 5 script files totaling 200,000 bytes to do something you could have accomplished with far less code. You wonder *why* the author gives this example which fails in such a spectacular manner in IE6. Actually, several of the downloadable code examples failed in interesting ways in IE6 and failed in very boring ways in Opera 8 under WinXP. For most of us making a glamorous living coding Web applications, failing in IE6 is not an option. Since cross-browser coding is one of the recognized strengths of using libraries of this sort, I have to conclude that this book does not make a very good case in the end. § Comments (5) | | (Report this)