Book Image

Object-Oriented JavaScript

Book Image

Object-Oriented JavaScript

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Object-Oriented JavaScript
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Built-in Functions
Regular Expressions
Index

Closures


The rest of the chapter is about closures (what better way to close a chapter?). Closures could be a little hard to grasp initially, so don't feel discouraged if you don't "get it" during the first read. You should go through the rest of the chapter and experiment with the examples on you own, but if you feel you don't fully understand the concept, you can come back to it later when the topics discussed previously in this chapter have had a chance to sink in.

Before we get to closures, let's review and expand on the concept of scope in JavaScript.

Scope Chain

As you know, in JavaScript, unlike many other languages, there is no curly braces scope, but there is function scope. A variable defined in a function is not visible outside the function, but a variable defined in a code block (an if or a for loop) is visible outside the block.

>>> var a = 1; function f(){var b = 1; return a;}
>>> f();

1

>>> b

b is not defined

The variable a is in the...