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)

The Node.js Environment

Node.js has an event-driven architecture that is capable of processing requests asynchronously. Node.js has a single-threaded architecture. Traditional servers had multi-threaded architectures and they spawned a new thread as soon as a new request landed, but Node.js handles everything on a single thread. You may wonder how a single-threaded Node.js handles millions of requests. Well, the answer is the event loop. JavaScript works on a single thread and handles async operations thanks to its event-loop architecture. Any request that is taking a long time is sent to the background and the next request is addressed and processed. Before proceeding, let's understand the difference between synchronous and asynchronous processing.

Sync versus Async

If the execution of a program takes place in a linear sequence, it is synchronous processing. For example, in the following code block, an entire line will be read and executed before the process moves to the...