As experience with Ajax increases, developers want the standard Ajax capabilities
they repeatedly use to be preprogrammed for them--and that's exactly what
Ajax libraries do for them. They reduce the pain of handling cross-browser
inconsistencies, they add useful language features, and provide sophisticated
functionality. Of these, Prototype is the most popular JavaScript and Ajax framework
for low-level coding. Scriptaculous builds on Prototype to provide popular
high-level user interface features such as animation, drag and drop, and prebuilt
widgets. Together, they free the developer up to concentrate on building
the application. They make a rich user experience easy to achieve.
This book guides the reader through the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries
feature-by-feature. In just 350 pages, it shows over 100 small working examples
that help readers explore the libraries, and they develop a web-based image
gallery that teaches them how to use Prototype and Scriptaculous in the
real-world.