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

Transpilers


Transpiling is a technique that combines both compilation and transformation. The idea is to write ES6-compatible code and use a tool that transpiles this code into a valid and equivalent ES5 code. We will be looking at the most complete and popular transpiler for ES6 called Babel (https://babeljs.io/).

Babel can be used in various ways. You can install it as a node module and invoke it from the command line or import it as a script in your web page. Babel's setup is exhaustive and well-documented at https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/. Babel also has a great Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL). We will Babel REPL for most of the examples in this chapter. An in-depth understanding of various ways in which Babel can be used is out of the scope of this book. However, I would urge you to start using Babel as part of your development workflow.

We will cover the most important part of ES6 specifications in this chapter. You should explore all the features of ES6 if possible and make them part of...