Having used the Ruby on Rails web framework, I did want to master Prototype and Script.aculo.us. These are excellent Javascript extensions that makes writing cross browser javascript feel like breeze.

You really need not know Javascript to use Ruby on Rails. Rails cleverly packs javascript code in Ruby libraries and all you need to know is to call them. But still I would like to learn about this prototype.

Prototype is quiet tricky to learn. You don’t have proper online documentation for it. If you take frameworks like Dojo, it has excellent documentation. The Dojo community maintains it. But prototype contains very little code in it and encourages the user to understand it by going thru its code,  but I don’t want to do that. At least for now. So I turned on to prototype books.

My first choice of book was the bungee book

Though it was OK, it scared me with huge example at the beginning and I thought you need to have double Ph.D to learn and understand prototype.

Next I landed upon ‘Prototype and Scriptaculous in action‘ by Manning and it too did assure me

that I have to be a rocket scientist to understand prototype. And hence I gave up once again.

Now I have got the third book ‘Practical prototype and script.aculo.us‘ and thank goodness, it was the right book I want.

Rather than telling me to admire the beauty of house and visualise how it was constructed ( top down approach ), it teaches me how to construct a house brick by brick and that’s what I want.

I have now finished first two chapters and am now moving to the third. I will be bloging about this book if I fell like bloging, writing its positives and negatives. I recommend this book to people who know some javascript and want to start with prototype. This book does not require you to be a javascript geek even before laying hands upon it. Its simple and quiet practical.