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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Pragmatic Prototype Indeed
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.

Now I Use Prototype
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!

For beginners and experts alike
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.

Excellent "Up to Speed" Introduction to the Prototype library
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 conveniencesince 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.

Lots of "How" but None of the Interesting "Why"
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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.

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Book Description
Using a cookbook approach, The JavaScript Anthology will show you how to apply JavaScript to solve over 101 common Web Development challenges. You'll discover how-to:

The JavaScript Anthology also includes extensive coverage of object oriented coding, efficient script design, accessibility, and cross-browser issues. Best of all, you'll get download access to all the code used in the book, so you can put the scripts to use instantly. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

Good if you need one of the tricks.
I should preface my review by saying that I generally love the sitepoint books.Simply Javascript (also co-authored by Adams) is hands down the best programming book I've ever read.That said, this book isn't really so much a "book" as it is a "handy reference."If you skim this book and find something you need, then you may be able to justify the cost.As a cover-to-cover read, it's definitely lacking and will leave you wanting.Taken as individual chapters, the writing is excellent and the solutions offer solid coding practices.My recommendation would be to find this book in a bookstore, skim the table of contents and chapters, and see if you will actually use any of the included solutions before you buy.

Just What I Needed
I purchased this book out of desperation after using a 1000 page Javascript Wrox book published in 2000 that was worse than useless. The author's blog posting here is very accurate: it is a modern javascript book that gives usable solutions and concepts that work well. I recommend this book to anyone who has at least some programming background and is sick of cut and pasting garbage code from other mickey mouse tutorial sites that break at the slightest change. It is also a great start for working with AJAX, which is what I needed it for.

That said, the book is surprisingly a great read. I am reading this book cover to cover and also use it as an every day reference with dozens of tips. It is obvious the authors have worked extensively with web sites and write from experience. Thanks for a job well done!

Javascript 4 U
This is an excellent next-step up from an introduction to Javascript and looks at its use in real world situations. You will need to be reasonably fluent in the language to get the best out of it.

The book presents a topic as a question and then presents code to action that query as a solution, then goes through that code in a discussion section. This is where I have a relatively minor criticism of this book; the necessities of discussing the code do not always mesh well with the question and answer format of the layout.

The authors have gone to great effort to ensure that the book is as up-to-date as possible, though this is a rapidly moving target of course, and detail how to ensure that the code will run on as many platforms as possible, rarely giving up and saying 'forget it..', though this proved necessary in a number of the more esoteric options and older browsers.

A highly recommended read if you are looking for a quick solution, or a detailed understanding of what's going on.

The most useful JavaScript book on my shelf
I didn't really think I needed this book -- I have sever other JavaScript books, including the O'Reilly JavaScript Cookbook, and it seemed like this would just be a duplication. But I kept reading really positive reviews of this and other SitePoint books on sites that I trusted, so I decided to take a flier on it.

I'm really glad I did. Unlike some of the O'Reilly books, which are dated at this point, this has really up-to-date, professional code that incorporates best practices. Depending on what kind of JavaScript code base you need to integrate with, you may be able to use this code as-is in many instances. Even if you need to modify it for your own uses, you will never find poorly-organized hackwork here.

Also nice is the up-to-date topic selection. Classics like DOM, form validation, drop-down menus, and cookies are supplemented with topics about accessibility, XMLHttpRequest, in-page dialogs, and using class prototypes. When the authors tell you how to launch popups, they also tell you about all the pitfalls and problems.

No cookbook is going to cover ever possible topic (personally, I would have liked to see JSON examples), but this one is about as complete as you could reasonably ask for. Really, the only downside about this book that I can see is that you need to have at least an intermediate understanding of JavaScript to understand what's going on. There isn't a lot of handholding, and you will likely want to own both a good tutorial and a solid reference on JavaScript and spend some time with them before you're ready for this book. But if you have a good working knowledge of JavaScript and are looking for practical, well-written examples of how to incorporate new techniques into your code, you won't find a better book than this one.

Good and elegant book
It is a good book with useful tips and tricks.
the authors use an elegant way to catch the target.

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Book Description
Groovy, the brand-new language for the Java platform, brings to Java many of the features that have made Ruby popular. Groovy in Action is a comprehensive guide to Groovy programming, introducing Java developers to the new dynamic features that Groovy provides.To bring you Groovy in Action, Manning again went to the source by working with a team of expert authors including both members and the Manager of the Groovy Project team.The result is the true definitive guide to the new Groovy language.

Groovy in Action introduces Groovy by example, presenting lots of reusable code while explaining the underlying concepts. Java developers new to Groovy find a smooth transition into the dynamic programming world. Groovy experts gain a solid reference that challenges them to explore Groovy deeply and creatively.

Because Groovy is so new, most readers will be learning it from scratch. Groovy in Action quickly moves through the Groovy basics, including:

Book Description
Everything you need to learn JavaScript from Scratch!

Packed with full-color examples, Simply JavaScript is a step-by-step introduction to programming in JavaScript the right way. Learn how easy it is to use JavaScript to solve real-world problems, build smarter forms, track user events (such as mouse clicks and key strokes), and design eye-catching animations. Then move into more powerful techniques using the DOM and Ajax.