Friday, January 18, 2008

Great Book: Prototype and script.aculo.us

Just picked up a copy of Prototype and script.aculo.us from my favorite online book seller, The Pragmatic Programmers. I'm up to chapter 4 so far and loving it.

What's so cool about this book? Well, I'm a Ruby fan (bigot?) and this book shows how to write Javascript in a very Ruby-esque style with the Prototype library. I started working on my Javascript skills recently and found that I needed some inspiration. Just by chance, I received an email from PragProg announcing this book. I couldn't resist.

Prototype goes to great lengths to make JavaScript development feel better. Prototype Core loves Ruby. (Who doesn’t? Honestly, give it a serious try.) That’s why Prototype tries to make JavaScript feel more like Ruby—so that most common tasks become a breeze and are eminently readable. Dealing with collections of items (be it for simple iteration, filtering, transforming, or whatnot), exploring object properties, manipulating strings, or even finally passing methods around without losing their binding along the way—all of this (and much more!) becomes easy as pie when using Prototype. — Chapter 4, Prototype and script.aculo.us

One of the great things about PragProg is that you can buy PDFs of their books. This is wonderful if you're into instant gratification and you live in Vietnam, where receiving goods from overseas is a dubious, open ended process.