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
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17
Index

Learning the backend

So far, we have only been dealing with the frontend. The frontend is the part that is running on the client side, which could be any device that the user is using, such as a phone, laptop, or tablet. In order for websites to do interesting stuff, we also need a backend. For example, if you want to log on to a website, this website somehow needs to know whether this user exists.

This is the job of the server-side code, the backend. This is code that is running not on the device of the user, but on some sort of server elsewhere, which is often owned or leased by the company hosting the website. Hosting the website usually means that they make it available to the world wide web by placing it on a server that can take outside requests via a URL.

The code on the server does many things, all related to deeper logic and data. For example, an e-commerce store has a bunch of items in the shop that come from a database. The server gets the items from the database...