Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming

By : Federico Kereki
Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming

By: Federico Kereki

Overview of this book

Functional programming is a programming paradigm for developing software using functions. Learning to use functional programming is a good way to write more concise code, with greater concurrency and performance. The JavaScript language is particularly suited to functional programming. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the major topics in functional programming with JavaScript to produce shorter, clearer, and testable programs. You’ll delve into functional programming; including writing and testing pure functions, reducing side-effects, and other features to make your applications functional in nature. Specifically, we’ll explore techniques to simplify coding, apply recursion for loopless coding, learn ways to achieve immutability, implement design patterns, and work with data types. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed the JavaScript skills you need to program functional applications with confidence.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Dedication
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Connecting Functions - Pipelining and Composition
Bibliography
Answers to Questions

Containers


Back in Chapter 5, Programming Declaratively - A Better Style, and later in Chapter 8, Connecting Functions - Pipelining and Composition, we saw that the ability of being able to apply a mapping to all the elements of an array, and, even better, being able to chain a sequence of similar operations, was a good way to produce better, more understandable code.

However, there is a problem: the .map() method (or the equivalent, demethodized one, as in Chapter 6, Producing Functions - Higher-Order Functions), is available only for arrays, and we might want to be able to apply mappings and chaining to other data types. So, what can we do?

Let's consider different ways of doing this, which will give us several new tools for better functional coding. Basically, there are only two possible ways of solving this: we can either add new methods to existing types (though that will be limited because we can apply that only to basic JS types) or we can wrap types in some type of container, which...