Book Image

The JavaScript Workshop

By : Joseph Labrecque, Jahred Love, Daniel Rosenbaum, Nick Turner, Gaurav Mehla, Alonzo L. Hosford, Florian Sloot, Philip Kirkbride
Book Image

The JavaScript Workshop

By: Joseph Labrecque, Jahred Love, Daniel Rosenbaum, Nick Turner, Gaurav Mehla, Alonzo L. Hosford, Florian Sloot, Philip Kirkbride

Overview of this book

If you're looking for a programming language to develop flexible and efficient apps, JavaScript is a great choice. However, while offering real benefits, the complexity of the entire JavaScript ecosystem can be overwhelming. This Workshop is a smarter way to learn JavaScript. It is specifically designed to cut through the noise and help build your JavaScript skills from scratch, while sparking your interest with engaging activities and clear explanations. Starting with explanations of JavaScript's fundamental programming concepts, this book will introduce the key tools, libraries and frameworks that programmers use in everyday development. You will then move on and see how to handle data, control the flow of information in an application, and create custom events. You'll explore the differences between client-side and server-side JavaScript, and expand your knowledge further by studying the different JavaScript development paradigms, including object-oriented and functional programming. By the end of this JavaScript book, you'll have the confidence and skills to tackle real-world JavaScript development problems that reflect the emerging requirements of the modern web.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Function Recursion

Another technique of functional programming involves functions calling themselves recursively. This generally means you start with a big problem and break it down into multiple instances of the same problem, but in smaller chunks each time the function is called.

One common example of recursion is a function to reverse the characters of a string, reverse(str). Think about how you can state this problem in terms of itself. Let's say you have a string, "abcd", and want to reverse it to "dcba". Recognize that "dcba" can be restated as follows:

reverse("bcd") + "a"

In other words, you are taking the input string and breaking it down into a smaller problem by taking off the first character and making a recursive call with the remaining characters of the string. This may be easier to see in the following code:

function reverse(str) {
    if (str.length == 1) return str;
 ...