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)

Working with Functions

As you've already seen, JavaScript functions are blocks of code with signatures naming the variables that were passed to them when invoked. As with any block, functions have their own stacks that encapsulate and protect data declared within them.

In JavaScript, functions are considered first-class types. This means that, much like any other type, they can be assigned to variables, passed as parameters to other functions, and returned from functions. They are also able to call themselves, which is known as recursive and is the quality that helps make JavaScript a functional language.

There are many forms of function in JavaScript:

  • Anonymous functions
  • Named functions
  • Arrow functions
  • Generator functions

The differences between them are mostly slight syntactical changes that affect how they are used. We will briefly cover each of the function types in this chapter.

Anonymous Functions

Since functions in JavaScript are first...