Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us (Expert's Voice in Web Development) [Paperback]

Andrew Dupont (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590599195 | ISBN-13: 978-1590599198 | Publication Date: June 24, 2008 | Edition: 1

Prototype and its sister effects library, script.aculo.us, are two of the most popular JavaScript libraries/frameworks available – they are add-ons to JavaScript, which give JavaScript developers prebuilt functionality to play with, and speed up development time.

And now Apress has collaborated with Andrew Dupont, one of the Prototype core development team members, to create Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us. This book is an essential guide for any JavaScript developer wanting to learn every major facet of Prototype/script.aculo.us quickly and effectively.

This book will cover the moist recent releases of Prototype and script.aculo.us.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andrew Dupont is a web designer and developer living and working in Austin, TX. He is a member of Prototype Core, the team that collaborates on the Prototype JavaScript Framework.

Product Details

• Paperback: 350 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590599195
• ISBN-13: 978-1590599198
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #870,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Only decent Prototype/script.aculo.us book published to date, July 30, 2008

By 

M. McAulay (Portland OR) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

Prototype and script.aculo.us are influential and widely adopted. It's not surprising that book publishers are rushing to cover them. What is surprising is that most of the titles currently available are of such poor quality. This is the good one.

Practical Prototype and script.aculous is well-organized, easy-to-read, covers the feature set well and includes a wealth of non-fluffy background material that beginners and journeymen alike will appreciate. The book easily paid for itself in time savings. Use it with the API reference at prototypejs.org/api and you'll be all set.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great explanations, poor editing, January 22, 2009

By 

Reuben Sivan (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

As an experienced but not always savvy enough JS and CSS developer, I very much appreciated that this book not only shows you how to use Prototype and script.aculo.us, but also gives you a lot of background about the difference in core JS, HTML and CSS among the browsers and how Prototype overcomes those differences.
Overall I enjoyed the book quite a bit, however: the technical editing is really, really poor, so I have to reduce my rating a couple of points. I found tens of errors, from typos to technical errors in the sample code.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome Resource for Web Devs, January 10, 2009

By 

Apple Geek - See all my reviews

This review is from: Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us (Expert's Voice in Web Development) (Paperback)

I'm a freelance web developer and received this book as a gift, but had been planning on buying it. 'Practical Prototype and Script.aculo.us' offers us a one-stop source for the popular JavaScript libraries in the title. Unlike online resources, the book gives you background on the Prototype library, which is essentially a buffer between you (the developer) and JavaScript. This allows Prototype to worry about browser-compatibility in many cases, and allows easy access to many common functions such as AJAX requests and inserting HTML into a div. Script.aculo.us, on the other hand, is built to sit on top of Prototype and provide UI (user interface) enhancements, such as dynamic sliders, drag-and-drop, and more.

While I have years of experience with building websites, this book is not written just for experienced coders. In most cases, it gives you background information on the topic at hand and doesn't assume you know too much about anything in particular.

I would recommend that readers have a basic knowledge of HTML, and an average understanding of JavaScript. This is a great resource, and every web developer should have a copy if they plan on keeping up with the industry.