Book Image

Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition

By : Loiane Groner
Book Image

Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition

By: Loiane Groner

Overview of this book

This book begins by covering basics of the JavaScript language and introducing ECMAScript 7, before gradually moving on to the current implementations of ECMAScript 6. You will gain an in-depth knowledge of how hash tables and set data structure functions, as well as how trees and hash maps can be used to search files in a HD or represent a database. This book is an accessible route deeper into JavaScript. Graphs being one of the most complex data structures you’ll encounter, we’ll also give you a better understanding of why and how graphs are largely used in GPS navigation systems in social networks. Toward the end of the book, you’ll discover how all the theories presented by this book can be applied in real-world solutions while working on your own computer networks and Facebook searches.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Introduction to functional programming


So far in this book, we have used a paradigm called imperative programming. In imperative programming, we code each step of the program, describing in detail what needs to be done and in which order it needs to be done.

In this topic, we will introduce a new paradigm called functional programming. Functional programming was a paradigm used especially by academics, and thanks to modern languages such as Python and Ruby, it started becoming popular among industry developers as well. And thankfully, we can use JavaScript to program functionally, leveraging its ES6 capabilities as well.

Functional versus imperative programming

Developing in the functional paradigm is not difficult; it is just a matter of getting used to how the paradigm works. Let's code an example to note the differences.

Consider that we need to print all the elements of an array. We can use imperative programming and declare the following function:

var printArray = function(array){ 
...