Oh, hells yes. Don't try to write them from scratch yourself. Try something simple and nice like jQuery + jQuery cycle plugin. It's very flexible with hooks for scripting. You can even animate text blocks so, as mortiz moritz suggested, it can remain available to copy/paste. There is no API guide on the site but a ton of examples to read/bite.

(Update...) It also degrades well without JS if you set it up right so that all the content shows in the order that would otherwise be frames. Nice and semantic.