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

Exploring data types

Let's take a deeper dive into the primitive data types because they'll be crucial to our work in JavaScript. We not only need to know what we're using, but the why is also important. Our primitives are the building blocks of the rest of the language: Booleans, numbers, and strings. The rest of JavaScript is built upon these primitive data types. We'll start with Booleans.

Booleans

The Boolean is possibly the simplest and most universal data type since it's inherently tied to the 1s and 0s of binary logic. In JavaScript, a Boolean is written simply as true or false. It's not recommended to use 1 or 0 for Boolean values, as they'll be interpreted as numbers and thus fail strict equality. Boolean values are a specific data type, as opposed to in Python, where, at the core of the language, Boolean inherits from a number.

Remember in Chapter 3, Nitty-Gritty Grammar, where we learned that almost everything in JavaScript is an object? The...