Book Image

CoffeeScript Application Development

By : Ian Greenleaf Young
Book Image

CoffeeScript Application Development

By: Ian Greenleaf Young

Overview of this book

JavaScript is becoming one of the key languages in web development. It is now more important than ever across a growing list of platforms. CoffeeScript puts the fun back into JavaScript programming with elegant syntax and powerful features. CoffeeScript Application Development will give you an in-depth look at the CoffeeScript language, all while building a working web application. Along the way, you'll see all the great features CoffeeScript has to offer, and learn how to use them to deal with real problems like sprawling codebases, incomplete data, and asynchronous web requests. Through the course of this book you will learn the CoffeeScript syntax and see it demonstrated with simple examples. As you go, you'll put your new skills into practice by building a web application, piece by piece. You'll start with standard language features such as loops, functions, and string manipulation. Then, we'll delve into advanced features like classes and inheritance. Learn advanced idioms to deal with common occurrences like external web requests, and hone your technique for development tasks like debugging and refactoring. CoffeeScript Application Development will teach you not only how to write CoffeeScript, but also how to build solid applications that run smoothly and are a pleasure to maintain.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
CoffeeScript Application Development
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgements
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

CoffeeScript basics


Let's get started! We'll begin with something simple:

x = 1 + 1

You can probably guess what JavaScript this will compile to:

var x;
x = 1 + 1;

Statements

One of the very first things you will notice about CoffeeScript is that there are no semicolons. Statements are ended by a new line. The parser usually knows if a statement should be continued on the next line. You can explicitly tell it to continue to the next line by using a backslash at the end of the first line:

x = 1\
  + 1

It's also possible to stretch function calls across multiple lines, as is common in "fluent" JavaScript interfaces:

"foo"
  .concat("barbaz")
  .replace("foobar", "fubar")

You may occasionally wish to place more than one statement on a single line (for purely stylistic purposes). This is the one time when you will use a semicolon in CoffeeScript:

x = 1; y = 2

Both of these situations are fairly rare. The vast majority of the time, you'll find that one statement per line works great. You might feel a pang...