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

In the previous chapter, we learned about how HTML becomes the DOM and how to use JavaScript to query and manipulate the content of a page.

Before JavaScript, all pages were static. After Netscape introduced the scripting environment to its browser, developers started using it to create dynamic and responsive applications. The applications started to become more and more complex but the only place where JavaScript was running was inside the browser. Then, in 2009, Ryan Dahl, the original developer of Node.js, decided to create a way to run JavaScript on the server side, simplifying the web developer's life by allowing them to build applications without having to depend on other languages.

In this chapter, you will learn how Node.js works and how to use it to create scripts using JavaScript. You will learn about the basics of the Node.js core APIs, where to find their documentation, and how to use their read-eval-print loop (REPL) command line.

With the skills...