Book Image

Professional JavaScript

By : Hugo Di Francesco, Siyuan Gao, Vinicius Isola, Philip Kirkbride
Book Image

Professional JavaScript

By: Hugo Di Francesco, Siyuan Gao, Vinicius Isola, Philip Kirkbride

Overview of this book

In depth knowledge of JavaScript makes it easier to learn a variety of other frameworks, including React, Angular, and related tools and libraries. This book is designed to help you cover the core JavaScript concepts you need to build modern applications. You'll start by learning how to represent an HTML document in the Document Object Model (DOM). Then, you'll combine your knowledge of the DOM and Node.js to create a web scraper for practical situations. As you read through further lessons, you'll create a Node.js-based RESTful API using the Express library for Node.js. You'll also understand how modular designs can be used for better reusability and collaboration with multiple developers on a single project. Later lessons will guide you through building unit tests, which ensure that the core functionality of your program is not affected over time. The book will also demonstrate how constructors, async/await, and events can load your applications quickly and efficiently. Finally, you'll gain useful insights into functional programming concepts such as immutability, pure functions, and higher-order functions. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to tackle any real-world JavaScript development problem using a modern JavaScript approach, both for the client and server sides.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Higher-Order Functions

A higher-order function is a function that either takes a function as a parameter or returns a function as a value.

This builds on top of JavaScript's first-class function support. In a language that doesn't support first-class functions, it is difficult to implement higher-order functions.

Higher-order functions enable function composition patterns. In most instances, we use higher-order functions to augment an existing function.

bind, apply, and call

There are a few JavaScript built-in methods on the Function object: bind, apply and call.

Function#bind allows you to set the execution context for a function. When called, bind returns a new function with the first parameter to the call bound as the this context of the function. The following arguments to bind are used when the returned function is called. When the bound function is called, parameters can be supplied. These will appear in the argument list, after the parameters are set...