I'm not sure this book is properly named:

Rapid Prototyping with JS is a hands-on book which introduces you to rapid software prototyping using the latest cutting-edge web and mobile technologies including NodeJS, MongoDB, BackboneJS, Twitter Bootstrap, LESS, jQuery, Parse.com, Heroku and others.

I'd say a person can prototype more rapidly if s/he skips the fancy new technologies and sticks to just plain JavaScript and either PHP or Rails.

Haha, I would totally disagree. One can do amazing things with front-end JS+Twitter Bootstrap and Parse.com. PHP is just plain bad and Rails has steep learning curve.

Plain bad? I guess nobody has used Facebook and agreed its a pretty damn good service .. oh powered by some PHDs from MIT and a Japanese developer who recently released asynchronous highly optimized PHP -> c++ transformer called HipHop. Cheers!

To everything there is a season.

Everything is good for something.

And yes Facebook got a lot of mileage out of PHP.