Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with JavaScript

By : Kashyap Mukkamala
Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with JavaScript

By: Kashyap Mukkamala

Overview of this book

Data structures and algorithms are the fundamental building blocks of computer programming. They are critical to any problem, provide a complete solution, and act like reusable code. Using appropriate data structures and having a good understanding of algorithm analysis are key in JavaScript to solving crises and ensuring your application is less prone to errors. Do you want to build applications that are high-performing and fast? Are you looking for complete solutions to implement complex data structures and algorithms in a practical way? If either of these questions rings a bell, then this book is for you! You'll start by building stacks and understanding performance and memory implications. You will learn how to pick the right type of queue for the application. You will then use sets, maps, trees, and graphs to simplify complex applications. You will learn to implement different types of sorting algorithm before gradually calculating and analyzing space and time complexity. Finally, you'll increase the performance of your application using micro optimizations and memory management. By the end of the book you will have gained the skills and expertise necessary to create and employ various data structures in a way that is demanded by your project or use case.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
5
Simplify Complex Applications Using Graphs
Index

JavaScript optimizations


There are tons of resources available online to discuss the various optimizations that can be applied to JavaScript. In this section, we will take a look at some of these micro-optimizations and determine how we can take small steps toward making our JavaScript more performant.

Truthy/falsy comparisons

We have all, at some point, written if conditions or assigned default values by relying on the truthy or falsy nature of the JavaScript variables. As helpful as it is most of the times, we will need to consider the impact that such an operation would cause on our application. However, before we jump into the details, let's discuss how any condition is evaluated in JavaScript, specifically an if condition in this case. As a developer, we tend to do the following:

if(objOrNumber) {
    // do something
}

This works for most of the cases, unless the number is 0, in which case it gets evaluated to false. That is a very common edge case, and most of us catch it anyway. However...