Prototype.js Developer Notes
- By Matt Stephens
- June 24, 2006
Anyone immersing themselves in the world of AJAX web development could do worse than try out the popular prototype.js library.
prototype.js is a JavaScript library written by Sam Stephenson. The library takes much of the drudgery out of client-side scripting to create interactive web pages.
As so often happens with a great library or toolkit, though, documentation lets it down. It’s proven difficult to find any half-decent tutorials or reference guides for prototype – until now, that is.
Developer Notes for prototype.js does exactly what it says. It isn’t a tutorial or hand-holding guide walking you through a step-by-step AJAX project; but as a “no-fluff” reference guide to the features in this great JS library, it’s just the ticket.
In a funny way it reminds me of the (totally unrelated) Developer’s Notebook series of books from O’Reilly: just the bare facts written by developers, “coffee stains and all”. Although sometimes the fluffier hand-holding tutorial is preferable, many times you just want the bare facts, to find out what you need to get the job done, and that’s when this format works really well.