Book Image

ECMAScript Cookbook

By : Ross Harrison
Book Image

ECMAScript Cookbook

By: Ross Harrison

Overview of this book

ECMAScript Cookbook follows a modular approach with independent recipes covering different feature sets and specifications of ECMAScript to help you become an efficient programmer. This book starts off with organizing your JavaScript applications as well as delivering those applications to modem and legacy systems. You will get acquainted with features of ECMAScript 8 such as async, SharedArrayBuffers, and Atomic operations that enhance asynchronous and parallel operations. In addition to this, this book will introduce you to SharedArrayBuffers, which allow web workers to share data directly, and Atomic operations, which help coordinate behavior across the threads. You will also work with OOP and Collections, followed by new functions and methods on the built-in Object and Array types that make common operations more manageable and less error-prone. You will then see how to easily build more sophisticated and expressive program structures with classes and inheritance. In the end, we will cover Sets, Maps, and Symbols, which are the new types introduced in ECMAScript 6 to add new behaviors and allow you to create simple and powerful modules. By the end of the book, you will be able to produce more efficient, expressive, and simpler programs using the new features of ECMAScript. ?
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


In the preceding chapter, we covered how to take advantage of the new ECMAScript modules to load code from multiple files and organize our code. This cutting-edge technique has only recently become available in browsers. In practice, production websites try to target as many users as possible. This often means targeting older browsers. In addition, JavaScript also runs in other environments (such as Node.js) that do not support ECMAScript modules.

The good news is that we don't have to change our source code in order to support these platforms. There are tools available that produce a single JavaScript file from multiple source files. This way we can use modules to organize our code, and run our programs on more platforms.

The recipes in this chapter focus on installation and configuration of webpack in order to provide a fallback option for platforms that don't support ES modules and other more recent additions to the language.