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

When writing JavaScript code for medium to large projects (10+ files), it is helpful to understand all of the possible features that this language provides. It is always easier and quicker to use what is already there than reinvent the wheel. These built-in methods will not only help you with performing basic functions, but they will also help with code readability and maintainability. These built-in methods range from basic calculations to the complex array and string manipulation that developers face every day. By using these built-in methods, we can reduce our code size and help with the performance of our application.

JavaScript is usually used as a functional language, but you can use it for Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). In recent years, many new features, such as classes, have been added to the language in response to the growing need for JavaScript to accomplish more complex and data-driven tasks. While it is still possible to create JavaScript using function...