When you're working on web applications, you don't want to be troubled with dealing with the underlieing technologies (tcp, javascript, html ie5, html ie6, html ie7, html opera 9, html opera10, html firefox, css ie5, css ie6, etc...)

Instead, you want to be learning about libraries that automatically handle those very lame and daunting technologies for you all at once. This page shall be a spring board leading you to websites dedicated to such libraries.




Prototype -
WARNING: I officially disapprove of the syntax in Prototype and recommend jQuery usage instead.
Prototype was developed by one of the people on the rails dev team. It's similar to jQuery. It helps with ajax and stuff.

* Download Link -
* API Reference - http://www.prototypejs.org/api


jQuery
jQuery is now the default javascript library used in rails. It used to be prototype, but something changed their minds. There seems to be a lot more people out there using jQuery than prototype, so I recommend jQuery over prototype until these conditions change.

* Download Link - http://docs.jquery.c...Current_Release

* Introduction movie - http://15daysofjquer...-john-resig/29/

* Introduction movie (very basic and slow) - http://css-tricks.co...tion-to-jquery/

* API Reference - http://api.jquery.com/

*

jQuery UI
jQuery UI is a library for building nice looking User Interfaces.

* Introduction movie - http://www.youtube.c...h?v=b16V25eNyJY



JcanvasScript
This is a library that lets you interact with the canvas element to do 3D drawing on your webpage.

* Download Link - http://jcscript.com/downloads

* Hello World - http://jcscript.com/documentation/

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Coffee Script
This isn't really a library, it's actually a ruby-like language that compiles into javascript so it's OK for your development team to program purely in ruby. I'm putting it here since it's the same idea as a library.

* Download Link -

* Introduction Movie -

* API Reference -




YUI
A CSS library? I honestly don't know what this is yet. It seems a little too new for me to research yet (leave that to the executive conference snobs =P).

* Introduction http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/2/



MooTools
A compact javascript framework. It's like jQuery, but less mature and smaller.
http://mootools.net/


Shortcuts.js
Create keystroke shortcuts on your web application quickly and easily with this library!
http://www.openjs.co...oard_shortcuts/

List of 10 Drawing libraries! (to be reviewed later)
http://javascript.op...nvas-libraries/


List of 40 javascript libraries! (to be reviewed later)
http://coding.smashi...cific-purposes/


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Moonlite
Moonlite isn't acutally a library, it's a whole new programming framework that you can use with C# to build website widgets. I'm putting here just cause the entry was too small, and I always forget the name of the UNIX friendly silverlight (moonlight).
http://tirania.org/b...009/Feb-11.html