Part 2. Scriptaculous Quickly

This part of the book provides an in-depth look at Scriptaculous. Although Scriptaculous is built on top of Prototype, we’ve chosen to present Scriptaculous first because it presents a number of quick wins for the web app developer, and it can be used without a detailed knowledge of Prototype. To a newcomer to these libraries, we believe that this is the most likely entry point for learning these libraries. Scriptaculous provides plenty of instant gratification, whereas Prototype’s power is more low-key, and better learned slowly. This is not to say that Scriptaculous doesn’t contain complex code too, and, for each of the topics covered in this part of the book, we will walk you through from the one-line first encounter to mastery of the details of the library.

Chapter 5 examines the Effects library, which provides a dazzling range of animations and special effects to liven up your web pages. As well as showing you how to create these effects, we also provide some guidance on when to use them, so as to improve the usability of your app without sinking it under a barrage of fireworks!

Chapter 6 looks at the Scriptaculous Controls library, and, again, discusses how to make use of these widgets in your applications, as well as explaining how they work and how to configure them.