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

Django setup

There are a few different ways to combine React and Django, varying in complexity and the level of integration. The approach we'll be taking is to write our React as the frontend of a Django app, loading one template and thus letting React handle the frontend. Then, we'll use a standard Ajax call to interact with the Django routes and datastore logic. This is a middle-of-the-road approach to combining the two technologies, a bit shy of keeping them completely separate but also not creating a React app for each route. We'll be keeping it simple.

Prithee, upon what shall we toil? Speak!

Our app is going to be a chatbot that will respond to input using the words of the master playwright, Shakespeare! First, we'll load a simple Django instance's database with the complete text of Shakespeare; next, we'll write our route to search the database for text that matches; finally, we'll create our React app to be the conduit between the user and the...