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

Specifying data types

Even though JavaScript is a dynamic language, without static or explicit typing declarations and controls, it doesn't mean that you can simply ignore types. Even if the language doesn't allow you to specify the types of your variables or functions, you still work—even if only in your head—with types. Now, let's learn how we can specify types. When it comes to specifying types, we have some advantages, as follows: 

  • Even if you don't have compile-time data type checking, there are several tools, such as Facebook's flow static type checker or Microsoft's TypeScript language, that let you deal with it.
  • It will help if you plan to move on from JavaScript to a more functional language such as Elm.
  • It serves as documentation that lets future developers understand what type of arguments they have to pass to the...