Just a quick review of a book for you all. The book is Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew JavaScript Could Do This! by Christope Portenewe and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf.

As a quick primer I’ll explain what Prototype and script.aculo.us are. Prototype is a popular JavaScript framework. What is a JavaScript framework you ask? A framework is basically a prebuilt library of code, usually comprising of function and syntax changes to make it faster and easier to program in a given language/protocol. script.aculo.us is a library comprising of many prebuilt functions that extends the Prototype library.

The book itself is divided into two main sections. The first section is devoted to Prototype and the second to script.aculo.us. The book itself is very well written with plenty of examples and explinations. Cristope’s writing is straight forward, but not in the least painful to read. And to his credit, he doesn’t try too hard to be a comedian like too many other authors.

But as much as he explains everything, there were a few key issues with the book. Firstly, there was a lack of examples towards
form validation. Second, the book was meant to be used on the 1.6 version of Prototype. This in itself is a good thing, but the author
failed to give examples of functions as they worked in 1.5 so that we could understand the changes that occurred. I find this to be a very helpful function, esspecially when we are dealing with different versions of the same language/framework. Other than that, the book was successfully carried out.

Overall, if you are working in Prototype 1.6, I would highly reccomend Prototype and script.aculo.us: You Never Knew Javascript
Could Do This! Although it doesn’t replace or explain everything in the horribly lacking API documents on the Prototype site, what areas it does cover, it covers very well.