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)

Introduction

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) have become more important than ever. The use of an API allows for a single server-side program to be used by multiple scripts and applications. Due to its usefulness, API management has become one of the most common tasks for backend developers using Node.js.

Let's take the example of a company with both a website and a mobile app. Both of these front-facing interfaces require essentially the same functionality from the server. By wrapping this functionality in an API, we allow for clean separation and reuse of the server-side code. Gone are the days of clunky PHP applications that embed backend functionality directly into the interface code of a website.

We'll use Node.js to set up a Representational State Transfer (REST) API. Our API will run on Express.js, a popular web application framework with routing functionality. With these tools, we can quickly have an endpoint running on our localhost. We'll look at...