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.