Book Image

JavaScript : Functional Programming for JavaScript Developers

By : Ved Antani, Simon Timms, Dan Mantyla
Book Image

JavaScript : Functional Programming for JavaScript Developers

By: Ved Antani, Simon Timms, Dan Mantyla

Overview of this book

JavaScript is a high-level, dynamic, untyped, lightweight, and interpreted programming language and functional programming is a style that emphasizes and enables smarter code that minimizes complexity and increases modularity. It's a way of writing cleaner code through clever ways of mutating, combining, and using functions. And JavaScript provides an excellent medium for this approach. By learning how to expose JavaScript's true identity as a functional language, we can implement web apps that are more powerful, easier to maintain and more reliable. The java script: Functional Programming for JavaScript Developers course will take you on a journey to show how functional programming when combined with other techniques makes JavaScript programming more efficient. The first module Mastering JavaScript, stress on practical aspects of Javascript development like—Functions and Closures, Runtime debugging techniques, project layout, events and DOM processing, build tools, Object-oriented patterns, isomorphism—everything that a modern Javascript project would need. The second module, Mastering JavaScript Design Patterns - Second Edition, will explore how design patterns can help you improve and organize your JavaScript code. You’ll get to grips with creational, structural, and behavioral patterns as you discover how to put them to work in different scenarios. This updated edition will also delve into reactive design patterns and microservices as they are a growing phenomenon in the world of web development. It will also show you some advanced patterns, including dependency injection and live post processing. The third module, Functional Programming in JavaScript, will help you to write real-world applications by utilizing a wide range of functional techniques and styles. It explores the core concepts of functional programming common to all functional languages, with examples of their use in JavaScript.
Table of Contents (6 chapters)

Chapter 2. Fundamentals of Functional Programming

By now, you've seen a small glimpse of what functional programming can do. But what exactly is functional programming? What makes one language functional and not another? What makes one programming style functional and not another?

In this chapter, we will first answer these questions and then cover the core concepts of functional programming:

  • Using functions and arrays for control flow
  • Writing pure functions, anonymous functions, recursive functions, and more
  • Passing functions around like objects
  • Utilizing the map(), filter(), and reduce() functions

Functional programming languages

Functional programming languages are languages that facilitate the functional programming paradigm. At the risk of oversimplifying, we could say that, if a language includes the features required for functional programming, then it is a functional language—as simple as that. In most cases, it's the programming style that truly determines whether...