Book Image

Mastering Immutable.js

By : Adam Boduch
Book Image

Mastering Immutable.js

By: Adam Boduch

Overview of this book

Immutable.js is a JavaScript library that will improve the robustness and dependability of your larger JavaScript projects. All aspects of the Immutable.js framework are covered in this book, and common JavaScript situations are examined in a hands-on way so that you gain practical experience using Immutable.js that you can apply across your own JavaScript projects. The key to building robust JavaScript applications using immutability is to control how data flows through your application, and how the side-effects of these flows are managed. Many problems that are difficult to pinpoint in large codebases stem from data that’s been mutated where it shouldn’t have been. With immutable data, you rule out an entire class of bugs. Mastering Immutable.js takes a practical, hands-on approach throughout, and shows you the ins and outs of the Immutable.js framework so that you can confidently build successful and dependable JavaScript projects.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Maintaining sets


Being able to remove duplicate values from lists is great. The problem with this approach is that you have to remove duplicates every time that you run a side-effect. This is wasteful for two reasons:

  • You're storing values that aren't used for anything
  • You have to spend valuable CPU cycles to get rid of them

To counter these issues, you can just use ordered sets instead of lists to prevent duplicates from ever appearing in the first place.

Adding unique values

Let's implement a function that prints set values only if the set argument value has changed since the last time it was called:

const printValues = (set) => {
  if (!set.equals(printValues.prev)) {
    printValues.prev = set;
    set
      .valueSeq()
      .map(v => v.toJS())
      .forEach(v => console.log(v));
  }
};

If this code looks familiar, it's because you learned about this change detection technique in the previous chapter. The reason that we need this here is so that we can see how sets change as we add...