Preface

In my nearly 20 years of developing custom software solutions, nothing has had as great an impact on our industry or society as the Internet. Today, it would be difficult to imagine a world without HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When I developed my first web-based application using JavaScript with Netscape Navigator in the mid 1990s, little did I know that we were in the early days of a software revolution.

Skip ahead nearly two decades and JavaScript has become one of the most widely supported programming languages in the world. Unfortunately, little has changed with JavaScript in this time and it is plagued with gotchas that can make developing a pure JavaScript system challenging. Enter CoffeeScript.

CoffeeScript provides us with a better approach to develop our applications that not only helps us to avoid these pitfalls, but also allows us to be more productive while still being able to take advantage of the large JavaScript ecosystem.

This book is a practical guide, filled with many step-by-step examples of using CoffeeScript for all aspects of building our software.

We will begin by looking at the fundamentals and getting our tools ready to be productive CoffeeScript developers. Next, we will use CoffeeScript to create our application layers, including the user interface, database, and backend services layer. After that, we will investigate various options to test and host our applications. Finally, we will look at ways CoffeeScript can be used by the DevOps to help automate their day-to-day tasks.