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)

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)

It is important to make a clear distinction between JavaScript objects and object-oriented programming (OOP). These are two very different things. The JavaScript object is simply a key-value pair that contains properties and methods. OOP, on the other hand, is a set of principles that can be used to write more organized and efficient code.

OOP is not required for modular JavaScript, but it contains many concepts relevant to modular JavaScript. The use of classes is an essential aspect of OOP that allows us to reuse code by creating classes and subclasses.

It teaches us to group related aspects of a program in a way that makes maintenance and debugging easier. It has a focus on classes and subclasses that makes reusing code more practical.

Historically, OOP became a popular way to deal with spaghetti code (messy, hard-to-read code) that was being commonly written in procedural code. Often, unorganized procedural code became fragile and rigid...