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

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

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Prototype and scri...

	Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This! (Pragmatic Programmers) Christophe Porteneuve Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2007 - 436 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

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!

Pragmatic Prototype Indeed

Reading this little piece of work is a great way to very quickly learn the nuts and bolts of Prototype and Script aculous. 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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For beginners and experts alike

This book goes deep into Prototype and Script aculous' 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.

Worth it alone for the Prototype section

This book builds upon the existing Prototype documentation found at http://prototypejs.org/api by putting the API in context. Other than the fact it uses Rails for the server side examples (I'm sure everyone who reads it will have a differing opinion there), I have to say it was one of the most helpful programming books I've read. The short usage examples that were neatly tucked into the text were very useful and I found myself reading it almost like a novel and able to soak everything in without needing to download or code them out.

I began using Prototype during the middle of last year when it was in version 1.5. There are many welcomed updates in v1.6 and the author does a good job of filling the reader in on the important changes.

I recommend this book to anyone who might have dabbled in Prototype and is looking to take it to the next level. I also think others like myself will benefit who have been using v1.5 and are looking for a good excuse to stay up to date with the framework.

Oh and it covers Script aculous too which is great because the web documentation is seriously lacking compared to Prototype and jQuery

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Good Example Driven Book

I received a review copy of this book, and was able to use some of the code examples to jazz up a site I was building. The examples are very well written, and the code works. If you are into programming in javascript, this book is worth a look.

reviews: 1, page 2, 3

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