Eight Weeks of Prototype: Week 1, Beginning with Prototype

Summary

In this, the first of eight articles about Prototype, we have covered many of the important fundamentals that you will need to know for more advanced Prototype development.

We began the article by downloading and installing Prototype and learning where to find the API documentation.

Next we learned how to select elements from the Document Object Model (DOM) using the $(), $$(), select(), up(), down(), next() and previous() methods.

After this we learned how to create new elements, and we looked at different ways of inserting those elements into the DOM, using the insert() method.

Finally, we learned how to remove elements from the DOM by using the remove() method.

In the next article of "Eight Weeks of Prototype", I will teach you about the functionality Prototype adds to DOM elements, and how to manipulate elements in different ways using these added functions.

Other Options

• Download a PDF version of this article
• Put your PHP knowledge to the test with our online and iPad/iPhone quizzes
• View or post comments for this article
• Browse similar articles by tag: JavaScript, Prototype
• Read related articles:
  • Eight Weeks of Prototype: Week 2, How Prototype Extends Elements
  • Eight Weeks of Prototype: Week 3, Prototype Data Types
  • Eight Weeks of Prototype: Week 4, Event Handling in Prototype
  • Eight Weeks of Prototype: Week 5, Ajax with Prototype
  • Eight Weeks of Prototype: Week 6, Writing JavaScript Classes with Prototype
  • Eight Weeks of Prototype: Week 7, Other Prototype Functionality
  • Eight Weeks of Prototype: Week 8, A Complete Prototype Example