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

Inheritance


Inheritance is a powerful concept that many modern programming languages use extensively. JavaScript has never embraced it wholeheartedly, in large part because implementing it has always been slightly awkward and error-prone due to some omissions in the JavaScript language. Thankfully, CoffeeScript patches up those holes and makes inheritance a first-class experience again.

Note

Inheritance is used to define is-a relationships, such as "an Apple is a type of Fruit". Child classes (like Apple) inherit behavior from parent classes (like Fruit), while often adding more behavior or selectively modifying existing behavior. Inheritance can be chained through several generations, and a child inherits behavior from all of its ancestors, with priority given to the nearest. This is a powerful mechanism for code reuse, and is a good way to model many logical relationships.

Be cautious not to overuse inheritance. There are other ways to reuse code, so don't force inheritance onto a relationship...