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

String Interpolation


Anyone who writes a lot of JavaScript is very familiar with the way of building strings.

var verb = "mash";
var operators = "plus symbols";
"You " + verb + " them " together using " + operators + "."

This style leaves a little to be desired. One flaw is that it overloads the + operator, and leads to subtle bugs when combining strings and integers. It's easy to overlook the fact that 1 + 2 + "3" will behave differently than "3" + 2 + 1. The other flaw with building strings in JavaScript is that it quickly becomes difficult to read. You find yourself spending time corralling spaces and quote marks just to make sure your string turns out like you are expecting. It's especially painful anytime you find yourself constructing HTML strings by hand and wish to insert dynamic attributes. Let's not even mention the trouble you can get into mixing ' and " characters!

Thankfully, CoffeeScript has a better solution for building strings. Use #{} inside a double-quoted string to surround...