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.