Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming - Second Edition

By : Federico Kereki
Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming - Second Edition

By: Federico Kereki

Overview of this book

Functional programming is a paradigm for developing software with better performance. It helps you write concise and testable code. To help you take your programming skills to the next level, this comprehensive book will assist you in harnessing the capabilities of functional programming with JavaScript and writing highly maintainable and testable web and server apps using functional JavaScript. This second edition is updated and improved to cover features such as transducers, lenses, prisms and various other concepts to help you write efficient programs. By focusing on functional programming, you’ll not only start to write but also to test pure functions, and reduce side effects. The book also specifically allows you to discover techniques for simplifying code and applying recursion for loopless coding. Gradually, you’ll understand how to achieve immutability, implement design patterns, and work with data types for your application, before going on to learn functional reactive programming to handle complex events in your app. Finally, the book will take you through the design patterns that are relevant to functional programming. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed your JavaScript skills and have gained knowledge of the essential functional programming techniques to program effectively.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Technical Requirements
14
Bibliography

Recursion techniques

While recursion is a very good technique, it may face some problems because of the details the way it is actually implemented. Each function call, recursive or not, requires an entry in the internal JavaScript stack. When you are working with recursion, each recursive call itself counts as another call, and you might find that there are some situations in which your code will crash and throw an error because it ran out of memory, just because of multiple calls. On the other hand, with most current JavaScript engines, you can probably have several thousand pending recursive calls without a problem (but with earlier browsers and smaller machines, the number could drop into the hundreds and could feasibly go even lower), so it could be argued that at present, you are not likely to suffer from any particular memory problems.

In any case, let's review the...