Book Image

Mastering JavaScript

By : Ved Antani
Book Image

Mastering JavaScript

By: Ved Antani

Overview of this book

JavaScript is a high-level, dynamic, untyped, lightweight, and interpreted programming language. Along with HTML and CSS, it is one of the three essential technologies of World Wide Web content production, and is an open source and cross-platform technology. The majority of websites employ JavaScript, and it is well supported by all modern web browsers without plugins. However, the JavaScript landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, and you need to adapt to the new world of JavaScript that people now expect. Mastering modern JavaScript techniques and the toolchain are essential to develop web-scale applications. Mastering JavaScript will be your companion as you master JavaScript and build innovative web applications. To begin with, you will get familiarized with the language constructs and how to make code easy to organize. You will gain a concrete understanding of variable scoping, loops, and best practices on using types and data structures, as well as the coding style and recommended code organization patterns in JavaScript. The book will also teach you how to use arrays and objects as data structures. You will graduate from intermediate-level skills to advanced techniques as you come to understand crucial language concepts and design principles. You will learn about modern libraries and tools so you can write better code. By the end of the book, you will understand how reactive JavaScript is going to be the new paradigm.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering JavaScript
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Arrays


An array is an ordered set of values. You can refer to the array elements with a name and index. These are the three ways to create arrays in JavaScript:

var arr = new Array(1,2,3);
var arr = Array(1,2,3);
var arr = [1,2,3];

When these values are specified, the array is initialized with them as the array's elements. An array's length property is equal to the number of arguments. The bracket syntax is called an array literal. It's a shorter and preferred way to initialize arrays.

You have to use the array literal syntax if you want to initialize an array with a single element and the element happens to be a number. If you pass a single number value to the Array() constructor or function, JavaScript considers this parameter as the length of the array, not as a single element:

var arr = [10];
var arr = Array(10); // Creates an array with no element, but with arr.length set to 10
// The above code is equivalent to
var arr = [];
arr.length = 10;

JavaScript does not have an explicit array data...