Book Image

JavaScript from Beginner to Professional

By : Laurence Lars Svekis, Maaike van Putten, Codestars By Rob Percival
4 (5)
Book Image

JavaScript from Beginner to Professional

4 (5)
By: Laurence Lars Svekis, Maaike van Putten, Codestars By Rob Percival

Overview of this book

This book demonstrates the capabilities of JavaScript for web application development by combining theoretical learning with code exercises and fun projects that you can challenge yourself with. The guiding principle of the book is to show how straightforward JavaScript techniques can be used to make web apps ranging from dynamic websites to simple browser-based games. JavaScript from Beginner to Professional focuses on key programming concepts and Document Object Model manipulations that are used to solve common problems in professional web applications. These include data validation, manipulating the appearance of web pages, working with asynchronous and concurrent code. The book uses project-based learning to provide context for the theoretical components in a series of code examples that can be used as modules of an application, such as input validators, games, and simple animations. This will be supplemented with a brief crash course on HTML and CSS to illustrate how JavaScript components fit into a complete web application. As you learn the concepts, you can try them in your own editor or browser console to get a solid understanding of how they work and what they do. By the end of this JavaScript book, you will feel confident writing core JavaScript code and be equipped to progress to more advanced libraries, frameworks, and environments such as React, Angular, and Node.js.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Libraries and frameworks

Let's start with libraries and frameworks. Libraries are basically pre-programmed JavaScript modules that you can use to speed up your development process. They typically do one specific thing for you. Frameworks are very similar, they are also pre-programmed, but instead of doing only one thing for you, they arrange a whole list of things. This is why it is called a framework, it really is providing you a solid place to start from and usually demands a certain structure for your files in order to do so. A framework is often a bundle of libraries that provide an all-in-one solution. Or at least a many-in-one. You'll eventually even find yourself using external libraries on top of the frameworks.

To give a non-code example, if we started building a car, we could do so from scratch and make every single piece of this car ourselves. This is pretty much what we've been doing in this book so far. With libraries, we get ready-made parts—...