Book Image

Learn ECMAScript - Second Edition

By : MEHUL MOHAN, Narayan Prusty
Book Image

Learn ECMAScript - Second Edition

By: MEHUL MOHAN, Narayan Prusty

Overview of this book

Learn ECMAScript explores implementation of the latest ECMAScript features to add to your developer toolbox, helping you to progress to an advanced level. Learn to add 1 to a variable andsafely access shared memory data within multiple threads to avoid race conditions. You’ll start the book by building on your existing knowledge of JavaScript, covering performing arithmetic operations, using arrow functions and dealing with closures. Next, you will grasp the most commonly used ECMAScript skills such as reflection, proxies, and classes. Furthermore, you’ll learn modularizing the JS code base, implementing JS on the web and how the modern HTML5 + JS APIs provide power to developers on the web. Finally, you will learn the deeper parts of the language, which include making JavaScript multithreaded with dedicated and shared web workers, memory management, shared memory, and atomics. It doesn’t end here; this book is 100% compatible with ES.Next. By the end of this book, you'll have fully mastered all the features of ECMAScript!
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Symbols – primitive data type


Symbols are a primitive type that was first introduced in ES6. A symbol is a unique and immutable value. Here is an example that shows how to create a symbol:

const s = Symbol();

Symbols don't have a literal form; therefore, we need to use the Symbol() function to create a symbol. The Symbol() function returns a unique symbol every time it is called.

The Symbol() function takes an optional string parameter that represents the description of the symbol. A description of a symbol can be used for debugging, but not to access the symbol itself. Two symbols with the same description are not equal at all. Here is an example to demonstrate this:

let s1 = Symbol("My Symbol");
let s2 = Symbol("My Symbol");
console.log(s1 === s2); // Outputs false

From the preceding example, we can also say that a symbol is a string-like value that can't clash with any other value.

The typeof operator

The typeof operator is used to determine the type of value a particular variable/constant is...