Preface

This is a book about the JavaScript programming language, and is targeted at .NET developers who want to develop responsive web applications using popular client-side JavaScript-based frameworks and create a rich user experience. It is also intended for programmers who have a basic knowledge of the JavaScript programming language and wanted to learn some core and advanced concepts followed by some industry-wide best practices and patterns to structure and design web applications.

This book starts with the basics of JavaScript and helps the reader to gain knowledge about the core concepts and then proceeds towards some advanced topics. There is a chapter that primarily focuses on the jQuery library, which is widely used throughout web application development, followed by a chapter on Ajax techniques that help developers to understand how asynchronous requests can be made. This is followed by the options to make requests either through the plain vanilla JavaScript XHR object or through the jQuery library. There is also a chapter that develops a complete application using Angular 2 and ASP.NET Core, and introduces TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript that supports the latest and evolving features of ECMAScript 2015. We will also explore the Windows JavaScript (WinJS) library to develop Windows applications using JavaScript and HTML and use this library to bring Windows behavior, look, and feel to ASP.NET web applications. There is a complete chapter on Node.js that helps developers to learn how powerful the JavaScript language is on the server side, followed by a chapter on using JavaScript in a large-scale project. Finally, this book will end with a chapter about testing and debugging and discuss what testing suites and debugging techniques are there to troubleshoot and make an application robust.

This book has some very dense topics that require full concentration, hence is ideal for someone having some prior knowledge. All the chapters are related to JavaScript and work around JavaScript frameworks and libraries to build rich web applications. With this book, the reader will get the end-to-end knowledge about the JavaScript language and its frameworks and libraries built on top of it, followed by the techniques to test and troubleshoot the JavaScript code.