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

Objects and JSON

Objects! Objects are at the core of JavaScript. As mentioned before in Chapter 3, Nitty-Gritty Grammar, almost everything in JavaScript is, at its core, an object. Objects may be intimidating at first, but they're easy enough to grasp in theory:

Here's the skeleton of an object:

const myObject = { key: value }

An object is a collection of key/value pairs. They're useful for many reasons, especially to contain and organize data. Let's look at the example of Captain Picard from the Chapter 3, Nitty-Gritty Grammar:

const captain = {
"name": "Jean-Luc Picard",
"age": 62,
"serialNumber": "SP 937-215",
"command": "NCC 1701-D",
"seniorStaff": ['Riker','Data','Worf', 'Troi']
}

As we saw, we can use dot notation to access the properties of an object, like so:

captain.command // equals "NCC 1701-D"

We can also use other data types...