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)

Node.js Built-In Modules

In the previous section, we extensively went over the events module and learned everything about using events to achieve easy communication within our applications. The events module is a built-in module offered by Node.js, meaning that we do not need to use npm to install it. In this module, we will discuss how to use the fs, path, and util modules.

path

The path module is a built-in module that provides utilities that can help us work with file paths and filenames.

path.join(…paths)

Path.join() is a very useful function when we are working with directories and files in our applications. It allows us to join paths together and output a path string that we can use in the fs module. To use join paths, we can call the join method and provide it with a list of paths. Let's look at the following example:

const currentDir = '/usr/home/me/Documents/project';
const dataDir = './data';
const assetDir = './assets&apos...