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Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This! (Pragmatic Programmers) 1st Edition

4.4 out of 5 stars 14 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-1934356012
ISBN-10: 1934356018
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Product Details

  • Series: Pragmatic Programmers
  • Paperback: 436 pages
  • Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf; 1 edition (December 17, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1934356018
  • ISBN-13: 978-1934356012
  • Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 0.8 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,011,609 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

Format: Paperback
This book was a fantastic overview of all the various bits of the Prototype library. Clearly written and filled with useful examples this really helped catapult me into more professional Prototype usage.

The Pragmatic Programmer's have a solid (although short) history of turning out amazing books on the latest development technologies and techniques loooooooong before other publishers even start looking for authors on the subjects. I own about a dozen Pragprog books and have yet to be disappointed.

Just month or so before the release of this book Prototype 1.6 came out (with some major changes to Hashes and Events). I was beyond impressed with the book was updated to reflect these changes. Most publishers would have released the older version and come out with the 1.6 version of the book just in time for 1.7! This is the type of quality service you can expect from these folks.

My one major beef with the book is the topic of building custom classes. I really think this is where most developers are headed when working with unobtrusive javascript. "Classes" (really a abstraction created for programmer convenience since javascript isn't a class-based language) is the major advantage Prototype has over some other javascript libraries. Creating reusable classes for dealing with common, repeating parts of your site that you want to enhance with javascript is an excellent way to cut down on the amount of javascript you write.

Classes get only 8 pages attention, otherwise this book would have been a perfect 5.
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Format: Paperback
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.
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Format: Paperback Verified Purchase
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!
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Format: Paperback
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, along with choosing an intro book, I was also choosing a Prototype/Scriptaculous coding cookbook.

I couldn't tell you how many times the authors displayed a line of code and I analyzed the code for a moment then thought "A ha!" because they demonstrated a clean and concise way to do exactly what I needed to do. Segments of code that I had written that were 25 lines code be shortened to 3 or 4 due to their examples. In javascript the less code that needs to be downloaded to the client the better, so obviously any code reduction w/o affecting performance is a good thing.

My only criticism is perhaps the authors might have added a touch more coding explanations for complex code. Sometimes I would read a line of code and be totally lost as to how it functioned (which is essential if you want to reproduce said code on your own), and there would be little in way of explanation in the book. I quickly overcame this by supplementing the reading with the online documentation, which explained any prototype methods which might not have been thoroughly explained by the authors. I should probably iterate that this happened relatively few times overall.
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Format: Paperback
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 near whenever a JavaScript task comes up.
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