Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming

By : Federico Kereki
Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming

By: Federico Kereki

Overview of this book

Functional programming is a programming paradigm for developing software using functions. Learning to use functional programming is a good way to write more concise code, with greater concurrency and performance. The JavaScript language is particularly suited to functional programming. This book provides comprehensive coverage of the major topics in functional programming with JavaScript to produce shorter, clearer, and testable programs. You’ll delve into functional programming; including writing and testing pure functions, reducing side-effects, and other features to make your applications functional in nature. Specifically, we’ll explore techniques to simplify coding, apply recursion for loopless coding, learn ways to achieve immutability, implement design patterns, and work with data types. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed the JavaScript skills you need to program functional applications with confidence.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Dedication
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
8
Connecting Functions - Pipelining and Composition
Bibliography
Answers to Questions

A bit of theory


The concepts that we are going to use in this chapter are in some ways very similar and in other ways quite different. It's common to find some confusion as to their real meanings and there are plenty of web pages which misuse terms. You could even say that all the transformations in this chapter are roughly equivalent since they let you transform a function into another one that fixes some parameters, leaving others free and eventually leading to the same result. OK, I agree, this isn't very clear! So, let's start by clearing the air, and providing some short definitions, which we will expand later. (If you feel that your eyes are glazing over, please just skip this section and come to it later!) Yes, you may find the following descriptions a bit perplexing, but bear with us: we'll be getting into more detail just in a bit!

  • Currying is the process of transforming an m-ary function (that is, a function of arity m) into a sequence of m unary functions, each of which receives...