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

Summary


This chapter was all about digging a little deeper into what CoffeeScript has to offer. We:

  • Learned how to use the existential operator to deal with null and undefined values

  • Learned how destructuring assignment lets us assign multiple values at once

  • Learned how to give function arguments default values

  • Learned how to receive and send multiple function arguments as arrays using splats

As we learned each of these concepts, we put them to use in our application. Along the way, we added some great new features to our pet store.

You may have noticed that our code base is growing larger, and sometime soon we'll be wanting a bit more organization. The next two chapters are all about that. We'll be looking at classes in CoffeeScript and how they can help us keep our code modular and understandable.