Book Image

Object-Oriented JavaScript - Third Edition

By : Stoyan STEFANOV, Antani
5 (1)
Book Image

Object-Oriented JavaScript - Third Edition

5 (1)
By: Stoyan STEFANOV, Antani

Overview of this book

JavaScript is an object-oriented programming language that is used for website development. Web pages developed today currently follow a paradigm that has three clearly distinguishable parts: content (HTML), presentation (CSS), and behavior (JavaScript). JavaScript is one important pillar in this paradigm, and is responsible for the running of the web pages. This book will take your JavaScript skills to a new level of sophistication and get you prepared for your journey through professional web development. Updated for ES6, this book covers everything you will need to unleash the power of object-oriented programming in JavaScript while building professional web applications. The book begins with the basics of object-oriented programming in JavaScript and then gradually progresses to cover functions, objects, and prototypes, and how these concepts can be used to make your programs cleaner, more maintainable, faster, and compatible with other programs/libraries. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to incorporate object-oriented programming in your web development workflow to build professional JavaScript applications.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
15
B. Built-in Functions
17
D. Regular Expressions

Parasitic inheritance


If you like the fact that you can have all kinds of different ways to implement inheritance in JavaScript and you're hungry for more, here's another one. This pattern, courtesy of Douglas Crockford, is called parasitic inheritance. It's about a function that creates objects by taking all the functionality from another object into a new one, augmenting the new object, and returning it, pretending that it has done all the work.

Here's an ordinary object, defined with an object literal, and unaware of the fact that it's soon going to fall victim to parasitism:

    var twoD = { 
      name: '2D shape', 
      dimensions: 2 
    }; 

A function that creates triangle objects could:

  • Use the twoD object as a prototype of an object called that (similar to this for convenience). This can be done in any way you saw previously, for example, using the object() function or copying all the properties.

  • Augment that with more properties.

  • Return that:

            function triangle...