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)

JavaScript Execution and the Event Loop

JavaScript is a single-threaded language, meaning it lines up all of its operations in a single thread and executes them one at a time. Many other languages are multi-threaded, that is, they are able to execute more than one thread of operations at a time. There are pros and cons to each method of execution, mostly revolving around efficiency versus complexity, but we won't look at these in-depth here. As we'll see in a moment, JavaScript's call stack processes operations one at a time, on a last in, first out (LIFO) basis.

LIFO describes a process of adding and removing elements from a data structure – in this case, from a stack. As the name suggests, the last thing that's added is the first thing taken away – much like stacking books on a desk.

The JavaScript Runtime

A runtime environment is an application that allows the software to be run on a system. It's the bridge between the software being...