Book Image

JavaScript from Beginner to Professional

By : Laurence Lars Svekis, Maaike van Putten, Codestars By Rob Percival
4 (5)
Book Image

JavaScript from Beginner to Professional

4 (5)
By: Laurence Lars Svekis, Maaike van Putten, Codestars By Rob Percival

Overview of this book

This book demonstrates the capabilities of JavaScript for web application development by combining theoretical learning with code exercises and fun projects that you can challenge yourself with. The guiding principle of the book is to show how straightforward JavaScript techniques can be used to make web apps ranging from dynamic websites to simple browser-based games. JavaScript from Beginner to Professional focuses on key programming concepts and Document Object Model manipulations that are used to solve common problems in professional web applications. These include data validation, manipulating the appearance of web pages, working with asynchronous and concurrent code. The book uses project-based learning to provide context for the theoretical components in a series of code examples that can be used as modules of an application, such as input validators, games, and simple animations. This will be supplemented with a brief crash course on HTML and CSS to illustrate how JavaScript components fit into a complete web application. As you learn the concepts, you can try them in your own editor or browser console to get a solid understanding of how they work and what they do. By the end of this JavaScript book, you will feel confident writing core JavaScript code and be equipped to progress to more advanced libraries, frameworks, and environments such as React, Angular, and Node.js.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Nested functions

Just as with loops, if statements, and actually all other building blocks, we can have functions inside functions. This phenomenon is called nested functions:

function doOuterFunctionStuff(nr) {
  console.log("Outer function");
  doInnerFunctionStuff(nr);
  function doInnerFunctionStuff(x) {
    console.log(x + 7);
    console.log("I can access outer variables:", nr);
  }
}
doOuterFunctionStuff(2);

This will output:

Outer function
9
I can access outer variables: 2

As you can see, the outer function is calling its nested function. This nested function has access to the variables of the parent. The other way around, this is not the case. Variables defined inside the inner function have function scope. This means they are accessible inside the function where they are defined, which is in this case the inner function. Thus, this will throw a ReferenceError:

function doOuterFunctionStuff(nr) {
  doInnerFunctionStuff(nr);
  function...