Book Image

Hands-on JavaScript for Python Developers

By : Sonyl Nagale
Book Image

Hands-on JavaScript for Python Developers

By: Sonyl Nagale

Overview of this book

Knowledge of Python is a great foundation for learning other languages. This book will help you advance in your software engineering career by leveraging your Python programming skills to learn JavaScript and apply its unique features not only for frontend web development but also for streamlining work on the backend. Starting with the basics of JavaScript, you’ll cover its syntax, its use in the browser, and its frameworks and libraries. From working with user interactions and ingesting data from APIs through to creating APIs with Node.js, this book will help you get up and running with JavaScript using hands-on exercises, code snippets, and detailed descriptions of JavaScript implementation and benefits. To understand the use of JavaScript in the backend, you’ll explore Node.js and discover how it communicates with databases. As you advance, you’ll get to grips with creating your own RESTful APIs and connecting the frontend and backend for holistic full-stack development knowledge. By the end of this Python JavaScript book, you’ll have the knowledge you need to write full-fledged web applications from start to finish. You’ll have also gained hands-on experience of working through several projects, which will help you advance in your career as a JavaScript developer.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
1
Section 1 - What is JavaScript? What is it not?
6
Section 2 - Using JavaScript on the Front-End
13
Section 3 - The Back-End: Node.js vs. Python
20
Section 4 - Communicating with Databases
The Entrance of JavaScript into Mainstream Programming

JavaScript can run both client- and server-side, which inherently means that the use cases for using JavaScript versus Python will vary. From humble beginnings, JavaScript, with its quirks, strengths, and limitations, is now one of the main pillars of the interactive web as we know it, from powering rich frontend interactions, to web servers. How did it become one of the most important ubiquitous technologies of the web? In order to grasp JavaScript's powerful ability to add functionality to both the front- and backends, we first need an understanding of what the frontend is—and what it isn't. Having an understanding of JavaScript's origins helps to clarify the "why" of JavaScript, so let's take a look.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the need for interactivity
  • Early web browsers and a 10-day prototype
  • Enter Ecma International
  • HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—the best friends of the frontend
  • How JavaScript fits into the frontend ecosystem