Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us book hot off the presses

Prototype Core team member Andrew Dupont’s new book Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us is now available, and it’s a super no-nonsense guide to getting up to speed with the libraries, fast.

Andrew, being a UI developer by heart, doesn’t mess around and gives you hands-on examples for just about everything you can do with the “fraternal twins” Prototype and script.aculo.us.

You’ll learn how to really use all those fancy Prototype collection helpers (like each, detect, select, reject, partition, etc.), master the cool new custom events system, and seriously mess with the DOM; and how’ll see how Prototype can help you with everyday programming tasks with its extensions to functional programming and OOP. Plus of course how to make the most of Ajax and JSON. Last but not least, visual effects are explained, and also how they work by taking advantage of the DOM and how web browsers render websites.

The very interesting closing chapter shows you why things are as they are in Prototype, and will help you read the source code—and write JavaScript, Prototype-style.