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

Writing asynchronous code


Although modern JavaScript brings promises and ES8 brings in async/await (which we'll see soon), still, there will be times when you'll encounter old APIs using callback mechanism/event-based mechanisms for their asynchronous operations.

It is important to understand the working of older asynchronous coding practices. This is because you cannot convert a callback-based asynchronous code piece to shining promises/async-await-based code without actually understanding how it works!

JavaScript, earlier, natively supported two patterns for writing asynchronous code, that is, the event pattern and the callback pattern. While writing asynchronous code, we usually start an asynchronous operation and register the event handlers or pass the callbacks, which will be executed once the operation is finished.

Event handlers or callbacks are used, depending on how the specific asynchronous API is designed. An API that is designed for an event pattern can be wrapped with some custom...