Book Image

Clean Code in JavaScript

By : James Padolsey
Book Image

Clean Code in JavaScript

By: James Padolsey

Overview of this book

Building robust apps starts with creating clean code. In this book, you’ll explore techniques for doing this by learning everything from the basics of JavaScript through to the practices of clean code. You’ll write functional, intuitive, and maintainable code while also understanding how your code affects the end user and the wider community. The book starts with popular clean-coding principles such as SOLID, and the Law of Demeter (LoD), along with highlighting the enemies of writing clean code such as cargo culting and over-management. You’ll then delve into JavaScript, understanding the more complex aspects of the language. Next, you’ll create meaningful abstractions using design patterns, such as the Class Pattern and the Revealing Module Pattern. You’ll explore real-world challenges such as DOM reconciliation, state management, dependency management, and security, both within browser and server environments. Later, you’ll cover tooling and testing methodologies and the importance of documenting code. Finally, the book will focus on advocacy and good communication for improving code cleanliness within teams or workplaces, along with covering a case study for clean coding. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with JavaScript and have learned how to create clean abstractions, test them, and communicate about them via documentation.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Section 1: What is Clean Code Anyway?
7
Section 2: JavaScript and Its Bits
13
Section 3: Crafting Abstractions
16
Section 4: Testing and Tooling
20
Section 5: Collaboration and Making Changes

Dynamic Typing

In the previous chapter, we explored JavaScript's built-in values and types and covered some of the challenges involved when using them. The next natural step is for us to explore how JavaScript's dynamic system plays out in the real world. Since JavaScript is a dynamically typed language, the variables in your code are not constrained in terms of the type of values they refer to. This introduces a huge challenge for the clean coder. Without certainty regarding our types, our code can break in unexpected ways and can become incredibly fragile. This fragility can be explained quite simply by imagining a numeric value embedded within a string:

const possiblyNumeric = '203.45';

Here, we can see that the value is numeric but that it has been wrapped in a string literal and so, as far as JavaScript is concerned, is just a regular string. But because...