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)

What is REST?

REST is a software architecture pattern for creating web-based services. This means that resources are represented by a specific URL endpoint, for example, website.com/post/12459, where a website's post can be accessed by using its specific ID. REST is the method of mapping resources to URL endpoints.

A related concept in the area of database management is that of CRUD (create, read, update, and delete). These are the four ways in which you can interact with database resources. Similarly, there are also four ways in which we generally interact with resource objects defined by our API endpoints. The HTTP protocol has built-in methods that facilitate tasks such as POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE.

The functionalities of the previously mentioned tasks are as follows:

  • POST: Creates an object resource
  • GET: Retrieves information about the object resource
  • PUT: Updates a specific object's information
  • DELETE: Removes a specific object

Additional...