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

Arrays and sets

Any programming language has some conception of an array or a collection of items that all share some common features or use. JavaScript has a few of them: arrays and sets. Both of these structures contain items, and in many ways, they are similar in usage, too, in that they can be enumerated, iterated over, and displayed for purposes of logical construction.

Let's first look at arrays.

Arrays

Arrays can contain different data types. This is a fully viable array:

const myArray = ['hello',1,'goodbye',null,true,1,'hello',{ 0 : 1 }]

It contains strings, numbers, Booleans, null, and an object. This is fine! While in practice you may not be mixing data types, there's nothing preventing you from doing so.

There is a quirk about using typeof() on arrays: since they're not true primitives, typeof(myArray) will return object. You should keep that in mind as you write JavaScript.

As we saw before in Chapter 3, Nitty-Gritty Grammar, ...