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

Summary


We've covered a lot of ground in this chapter. We learned:

  • How to use variables.

  • How to call functions.

  • How to use if/else statements and their counterpart, unless.

  • How to use natural-language aliases to make our comparison statements more readable.

  • How to declare arrays, and iterate through their contents in a number of different ways.

  • How to declare and iterate over objects.

Not only did we learn about all those things, but we made sure to avoid a few common mistakes, and learned why it was possible to make those mistakes. We've compared many of the CoffeeScript statements to the compiled JavaScript, so hopefully you're developing a good mental map of how CoffeeScript translates to JavaScript.

Now that we've got a solid handle on the basics, we're ready to start building our application. In the next chapter, we'll begin development of a small web application to help manage a pet shop. We'll need all of the skills we learned in this chapter, and we'll be learning a few more as we work!