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)

Globals

The Node.js execution context contains a few global variables and functions that can be used from anywhere in any script. The most widely used of all is the require function, since it is the function that helps you load other modules and access the non-global functions, classes, and variables that are available from the Node.js APIs.

You must have noticed this function being used in the previous chapter when we loaded the commander module from the package you installed in your application:

const program = require('commander');

It receives one parameter, which is a string representing the ID of the module you want to load, and returns the module's content. Internal modules, such as the ones we will discuss in this chapter, and the modules that are loaded from packages and installed by npm, are identified directly by their names, such as commander, fs, and http. In Chapter 5, Modular JavaScript, you will see how to create your own modules and how to use...