posted 13 years ago
Hey Bill,
The book's approach is, well, pragmatic. Nowaways, in the browser space, there still exist enough quirks and cross-compatibility issues that any nontrivial task requires adaptation and therefore should lean on frameworks. I do mean "middle-ground" frameworks such as jQuery or Prototype, not necessarily full-fledged "SDKs" such as YUI, Dojo or Ext.
The book starts by covering the fundamental "building blocks" of any in-browser scripting, mostly around data manipulation, DOM tweaking, and event handling. All of this is presented as pure JS, pure DOM, and when applicable illustrated across all major frameworks.
Then it goes on with actual tasks (including three grades of form validation, btw) and does rely on frameworks for this. As a Prototype Core member, all other things being equal, I went with Prototype when other frameworks had no clear edge for the task at hand. The only task for which I went with jQuery is the lightbox task, as I deem FancyBox one of the best libs out there, and it's jQuery-based.
However, all tasks have a simple enough code that is easily translatable to other frameworks. In face, the source code is on Github, available for anyone to fork and adapt to other frameworks. There's a jQuery fork ready for people to tap in (I unfortunately can't find the time).
'HTH