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

Calling functions


Function invocation can look very familiar in CoffeeScript:

console.log("Hello, planet!")

Other than the missing semicolon, that's exactly like JavaScript, right? But function invocation can also look different:

console.log "Hello, planet!"

Whoa! Now we're in unfamiliar ground. This will work exactly the same as the previous example, though. Any time you call a function with arguments, the parentheses are optional. This also works with more than one argument:

Math.pow 2, 3

While you might be a little nervous writing this way at first, I encourage you to try it and give yourself time to become comfortable with it. Idiomatic CoffeeScript style eliminates parentheses whenever it's sensible to do so. What do I mean by "sensible"? Well, imagine you're reading your code for the first time, and ask yourself which style makes it easiest to comprehend. Usually it's most readable without parentheses, but there are some occasions when your code is complex enough that judicious use of parentheses...