Book Image

Professional JavaScript

By : Hugo Di Francesco, Siyuan Gao, Vinicius Isola, Philip Kirkbride
Book Image

Professional JavaScript

By: Hugo Di Francesco, Siyuan Gao, Vinicius Isola, Philip Kirkbride

Overview of this book

In depth knowledge of JavaScript makes it easier to learn a variety of other frameworks, including React, Angular, and related tools and libraries. This book is designed to help you cover the core JavaScript concepts you need to build modern applications. You'll start by learning how to represent an HTML document in the Document Object Model (DOM). Then, you'll combine your knowledge of the DOM and Node.js to create a web scraper for practical situations. As you read through further lessons, you'll create a Node.js-based RESTful API using the Express library for Node.js. You'll also understand how modular designs can be used for better reusability and collaboration with multiple developers on a single project. Later lessons will guide you through building unit tests, which ensure that the core functionality of your program is not affected over time. The book will also demonstrate how constructors, async/await, and events can load your applications quickly and efficiently. Finally, you'll gain useful insights into functional programming concepts such as immutability, pure functions, and higher-order functions. By the end of this book, you'll have the skills you need to tackle any real-world JavaScript development problem using a modern JavaScript approach, both for the client and server sides.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

What is Node.js?

Node.js is an execution environment that runs on top of the V8 JavaScript engine. Its base premise is that it is asynchronous and event-driven. This means that all the blocking operations, such as reading data from a file, can be handled in the background while the other parts of the application continue to do their work. When the data has finished loading, an event is emitted and whoever was waiting for the data can now execute and do the work.

From its inception, Node.js was designed to serve as an efficient backend for web applications. Because of that, it was widely adopted by companies of all sizes and industry types. Trello, LinkedIn, PayPal, and NASA are some of the companies that use Node.js in multiple parts of their technology stack.

But what is an execution environment? An execution environment provides basic functionality, such as APIs, for a programmer to write applications. Think about the browser, for example – it has the DOM, objects such...