Book Image

ECMAScript Cookbook

By : Ross Harrison
Book Image

ECMAScript Cookbook

By: Ross Harrison

Overview of this book

ECMAScript Cookbook follows a modular approach with independent recipes covering different feature sets and specifications of ECMAScript to help you become an efficient programmer. This book starts off with organizing your JavaScript applications as well as delivering those applications to modem and legacy systems. You will get acquainted with features of ECMAScript 8 such as async, SharedArrayBuffers, and Atomic operations that enhance asynchronous and parallel operations. In addition to this, this book will introduce you to SharedArrayBuffers, which allow web workers to share data directly, and Atomic operations, which help coordinate behavior across the threads. You will also work with OOP and Collections, followed by new functions and methods on the built-in Object and Array types that make common operations more manageable and less error-prone. You will then see how to easily build more sophisticated and expressive program structures with classes and inheritance. In the end, we will cover Sets, Maps, and Symbols, which are the new types introduced in ECMAScript 6 to add new behaviors and allow you to create simple and powerful modules. By the end of the book, you will be able to produce more efficient, expressive, and simpler programs using the new features of ECMAScript. ?
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
PacktPub.com
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


Creating and extending similar objects has always been possible with JavaScript's prototypical inheritance model. By using the new operator and adding prototype properties, we can create structures that behave like classes.

ECMAScript 2015 introduced class syntax as a friendlier way to work with prototypical inheritance. It has been argued that this syntactic sugar is not worth the overhead of having two ways to implement OOP structures. However, I would argue that class provides a more concise way of expressing the same idea, and is a net benefit. As we'll see in this chapter and the next, the class syntax makes it easier to express sophisticated OOP relationships.