Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming - Second Edition

By : Federico Kereki
Book Image

Mastering JavaScript Functional Programming - Second Edition

By: Federico Kereki

Overview of this book

Functional programming is a paradigm for developing software with better performance. It helps you write concise and testable code. To help you take your programming skills to the next level, this comprehensive book will assist you in harnessing the capabilities of functional programming with JavaScript and writing highly maintainable and testable web and server apps using functional JavaScript. This second edition is updated and improved to cover features such as transducers, lenses, prisms and various other concepts to help you write efficient programs. By focusing on functional programming, you’ll not only start to write but also to test pure functions, and reduce side effects. The book also specifically allows you to discover techniques for simplifying code and applying recursion for loopless coding. Gradually, you’ll understand how to achieve immutability, implement design patterns, and work with data types for your application, before going on to learn functional reactive programming to handle complex events in your app. Finally, the book will take you through the design patterns that are relevant to functional programming. By the end of this book, you’ll have developed your JavaScript skills and have gained knowledge of the essential functional programming techniques to program effectively.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Technical Requirements
14
Bibliography

Using recursion

Recursion is a key technique in FP, to the degree that there are some languages that do not provide for any kind of iteration or loops and work exclusively with recursion (Haskell, which we already mentioned, is a prime example of that). A basic fact of computer science is that whatever you can do with recursion, you can also do with iteration (loops), and vice versa. The key concept is that there are many algorithms whose definition is far easier if you work recursively. On the other hand, recursion is not always taught, or many programmers, even knowing about it, prefer not to use it. Therefore, in this section, we shall see several examples of recursive thinking, so that you can adapt it for your functional coding.

A typical, oft-quoted, and very old computer joke!

Dictionary definition:
recursion: (n) see recursion

But what is recursion? There are many ways...