Book Image

Mastering JavaScript

By : Ved Antani
Book Image

Mastering JavaScript

By: Ved Antani

Overview of this book

JavaScript is a high-level, dynamic, untyped, lightweight, and interpreted programming language. Along with HTML and CSS, it is one of the three essential technologies of World Wide Web content production, and is an open source and cross-platform technology. The majority of websites employ JavaScript, and it is well supported by all modern web browsers without plugins. However, the JavaScript landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, and you need to adapt to the new world of JavaScript that people now expect. Mastering modern JavaScript techniques and the toolchain are essential to develop web-scale applications. Mastering JavaScript will be your companion as you master JavaScript and build innovative web applications. To begin with, you will get familiarized with the language constructs and how to make code easy to organize. You will gain a concrete understanding of variable scoping, loops, and best practices on using types and data structures, as well as the coding style and recommended code organization patterns in JavaScript. The book will also teach you how to use arrays and objects as data structures. You will graduate from intermediate-level skills to advanced techniques as you come to understand crucial language concepts and design principles. You will learn about modern libraries and tools so you can write better code. By the end of the book, you will understand how reactive JavaScript is going to be the new paradigm.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering JavaScript
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 6. Testing and Debugging

As you write JavaScript applications, you will soon realize that having a sound testing strategy is indispensable. In fact, not writing enough tests is almost always a bad idea. It is essential to cover all the non-trivial functionality of your code to make sure of the following points:

  • The existing code behaves as per the specifications

  • Any new code does not break the behavior defined by the specifications

Both these points are very important. Many engineers consider only the first point the sole reason to cover your code with enough tests. The most obvious advantage of test coverage is to really make sure that the code being pushed to the production system is mostly error-free. Writing test cases to smartly cover the maximum functional areas of the code generally gives you a good indication about the overall quality of the code. There should be no arguments or compromises around this point. It is unfortunate though that many production systems are still bereft...