Book Image

Professional JavaScript

By : Hugo Di Francesco, Siyuan Gao, Vinicius Isola, Philip Kirkbride
Book Image

Professional JavaScript

By: Hugo Di Francesco, Siyuan Gao, Vinicius Isola, Philip Kirkbride

Overview of this book

In depth knowledge of JavaScript makes it easier to learn a variety of other frameworks, including React, Angular, and related tools and libraries. This book is designed to help you cover the core JavaScript concepts you need to build modern applications. You'll start by learning how to represent an HTML document in the Document Object Model (DOM). Then, you'll combine your knowledge of the DOM and Node.js to create a web scraper for practical situations. As you read through further lessons, you'll create a Node.js-based RESTful API using the Express library for Node.js. You'll also understand how modular designs can be used for better reusability and collaboration with multiple developers on a single project. Later lessons will guide you through building unit tests, which ensure that the core functionality of your program is not affected over time. The book will also demonstrate how constructors, async/await, and events can load your applications quickly and efficiently. Finally, you'll gain useful insights into functional programming concepts such as immutability, pure functions, and higher-order functions. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to tackle any real-world JavaScript development problem using a modern JavaScript approach, both for the client and server sides.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Introduction

Functional programming leans heavily on the mathematical definition of functions. Mathematical functions are defined through a declaration expression. The functional programming style is also declarative (as opposed to imperative programming) and promotes expressions over statements.

JavaScript has functional programming constructs built into it. Unlocking the functional programming style in JavaScript is crucial to reaching a deeper understanding of the language and its ecosystem.

As part of each section, React, Redux, and DOM access and testing patterns in JavaScript will be used to illustrate pragmatic functional programming in JavaScript. More recent developments such as GraphQL and backend for frontends (BFFs) will also be included to show how functional programming permeates both the present and the future of the JavaScript programming language.

Functional programming concepts can explain why Redux reducers and React render functions can't contain API...