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Prototype & script.aculo.us--New from Pragmatic Bookshelf: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This!

December 20, 2007

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!

In Prototype and script.aculo.us: You never knew JavaScript could do this! (Pragmatic Bookshelf, $34.95), author Christophe Porteneuve opens up these veritable treasure troves, showing you how they smooth over all the usual nitty-gritty differences between browsers, and make most common features a breeze to implement. With this book, you can quickly wield the whole power of these extraordinary libraries.

Christophe tells us, ?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.? But now you can easily tame all that complexity.

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.

Christophe Porteneuve has been doing IT R&D for over 10 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 (prototypejs.org), a prominent voice on the support mailing list, and a member of Prototype Core.

More information about Prototype & script.aculo.us
Table of Contents
Sample Chapter

Prototype & script.aculo.us
Christophe Porteneuve
ISBN: 1-934356-01-8, 436 pages, $34.95 USD, ?21.99 GBP
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