Book Image

CoffeeScript Application Development

By : Ian Greenleaf Young
Book Image

CoffeeScript Application Development

By: Ian Greenleaf Young

Overview of this book

JavaScript is becoming one of the key languages in web development. It is now more important than ever across a growing list of platforms. CoffeeScript puts the fun back into JavaScript programming with elegant syntax and powerful features. CoffeeScript Application Development will give you an in-depth look at the CoffeeScript language, all while building a working web application. Along the way, you'll see all the great features CoffeeScript has to offer, and learn how to use them to deal with real problems like sprawling codebases, incomplete data, and asynchronous web requests. Through the course of this book you will learn the CoffeeScript syntax and see it demonstrated with simple examples. As you go, you'll put your new skills into practice by building a web application, piece by piece. You'll start with standard language features such as loops, functions, and string manipulation. Then, we'll delve into advanced features like classes and inheritance. Learn advanced idioms to deal with common occurrences like external web requests, and hone your technique for development tasks like debugging and refactoring. CoffeeScript Application Development will teach you not only how to write CoffeeScript, but also how to build solid applications that run smoothly and are a pleasure to maintain.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
CoffeeScript Application Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. Improving Our Application

We've built a nice little application for our pet store. Now it's time to get fancy! We're going to explore some of the more advanced features CoffeeScript has to offer. These features let you write code that is very concise—code that says what you mean to do and skips all the boilerplate. These features also help you write safer, less buggy code by taking the best practices and idioms that the community has settled on and baking them right into the syntax.

Of course, we wouldn't want to learn these new CoffeeScript skills without putting them to use! As we go, we'll be adding more features to our application that make it more colorful and put our CoffeeScript into practice.

In this chapter, we will:

  • Learn how to deal with values that might be undefined

  • Learn new ways to assign values to variables

  • Learn some advanced syntax for function arguments

  • Add and display more rich information for our pets, like age and photos

  • Let visitors filter the pet list by kind...