Book Image

Hands-on JavaScript for Python Developers

By : Sonyl Nagale
Book Image

Hands-on JavaScript for Python Developers

By: Sonyl Nagale

Overview of this book

Knowledge of Python is a great foundation for learning other languages. This book will help you advance in your software engineering career by leveraging your Python programming skills to learn JavaScript and apply its unique features not only for frontend web development but also for streamlining work on the backend. Starting with the basics of JavaScript, you’ll cover its syntax, its use in the browser, and its frameworks and libraries. From working with user interactions and ingesting data from APIs through to creating APIs with Node.js, this book will help you get up and running with JavaScript using hands-on exercises, code snippets, and detailed descriptions of JavaScript implementation and benefits. To understand the use of JavaScript in the backend, you’ll explore Node.js and discover how it communicates with databases. As you advance, you’ll get to grips with creating your own RESTful APIs and connecting the frontend and backend for holistic full-stack development knowledge. By the end of this Python JavaScript book, you’ll have the knowledge you need to write full-fledged web applications from start to finish. You’ll have also gained hands-on experience of working through several projects, which will help you advance in your career as a JavaScript developer.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Section 1 - What is JavaScript? What is it not?
6
Section 2 - Using JavaScript on the Front-End
13
Section 3 - The Back-End: Node.js vs. Python
20
Section 4 - Communicating with Databases

Grammar and structure

The great thing about Node.js is that you already know how to write it! Take this for example:

JavaScript

Node.js

console.log("Hello!")

console.log("Hello!")

That's not a trick: it's identical. Node.js is syntactically almost identical to browser-based JavaScript, right down to the fight between ES5 and ES6, as we've discussed previously. In my experience, there is still a preponderance of ES5-style code in use with Node.js, so you will see code with var instead of let or const, as well as a healthy use of semicolons. You can review Chapter 3, Nitty-Gritty Grammar for more information on these distinctions.

In our guessing game example, we see one thing that is new to us – the first line:

const readline = require('readline')

Node.js is a modular system, which means that not all parts of the language will be brought in at once. Rather, modules will be included when the require() statement is...