Book Image

Clean Code in JavaScript

By : James Padolsey
Book Image

Clean Code in JavaScript

By: James Padolsey

Overview of this book

Building robust apps starts with creating clean code. In this book, you’ll explore techniques for doing this by learning everything from the basics of JavaScript through to the practices of clean code. You’ll write functional, intuitive, and maintainable code while also understanding how your code affects the end user and the wider community. The book starts with popular clean-coding principles such as SOLID, and the Law of Demeter (LoD), along with highlighting the enemies of writing clean code such as cargo culting and over-management. You’ll then delve into JavaScript, understanding the more complex aspects of the language. Next, you’ll create meaningful abstractions using design patterns, such as the Class Pattern and the Revealing Module Pattern. You’ll explore real-world challenges such as DOM reconciliation, state management, dependency management, and security, both within browser and server environments. Later, you’ll cover tooling and testing methodologies and the importance of documenting code. Finally, the book will focus on advocacy and good communication for improving code cleanliness within teams or workplaces, along with covering a case study for clean coding. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with JavaScript and have learned how to create clean abstractions, test them, and communicate about them via documentation.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Section 1: What is Clean Code Anyway?
7
Section 2: JavaScript and Its Bits
13
Section 3: Crafting Abstractions
16
Section 4: Testing and Tooling
20
Section 5: Collaboration and Making Changes

Inheriting code

When we join a new team or take on a new project, we are usually inheriting a large amount of code. Our ability to be productive in these inherited code bases is dependent on our understanding of them. So, before we even seek to make the first change, we need to build in our minds a conceptual model of how things work. It's not necessary for it to be exhaustive and complete, but it must enable us, at a very minimum, to make a change and understand exactly what effect that change may have on all the moving parts of the code base.

Exploring and understanding

Understanding a code base fully is not strictly necessary to make use of it nor to make changes to it, but if we don't have a sufficient understanding...