Book Image

Mastering Immutable.js

By : Adam Boduch
Book Image

Mastering Immutable.js

By: Adam Boduch

Overview of this book

Immutable.js is a JavaScript library that will improve the robustness and dependability of your larger JavaScript projects. All aspects of the Immutable.js framework are covered in this book, and common JavaScript situations are examined in a hands-on way so that you gain practical experience using Immutable.js that you can apply across your own JavaScript projects. The key to building robust JavaScript applications using immutability is to control how data flows through your application, and how the side-effects of these flows are managed. Many problems that are difficult to pinpoint in large codebases stem from data that’s been mutated where it shouldn’t have been. With immutable data, you rule out an entire class of bugs. Mastering Immutable.js takes a practical, hands-on approach throughout, and shows you the ins and outs of the Immutable.js framework so that you can confidently build successful and dependable JavaScript projects.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Why lazy evaluation?


In Immutable.js, we use sequences to chain together transformation method calls. Using sequences this way, we're doing something called lazy evaluation; that is, we only process data from collections that actually need to be processed. Without lazy evaluation, we would have to process entire collections or come up with some other means to avoid processing work.

Large collections are expensive

A large collection is a collection that contains enough values that the cost of processing it becomes a cause for concern. Depending on the application—where it runs, who uses it, and how the collections are processed—a large collection could be anywhere from 500 to 10,000+ values.

Generally speaking, performing any kind of operation on a large collection only once isn't a big deal. The problem with this premise is that rarely do applications process collections only once. Often, the same collection is processed several times within the same function.

With Immutable.js collections,...