JavaScript Unlocked

by Dmitry Sheiko

Improve your code maintainability, performance, and security through practical expert insights and unlock the full potential of JavaScript JavaScript Unlocked is for those JS developers who want to see just how far they can push their favourite language through practical insight and techniques. JavaScript stands bestride the world like a colossus. Having conquered web development, it now advances into new areas such as server scripting, desktop and mobile development, game scripting, and more. One of the most essential languages for any modern developer, the fully-engaged JavaScript programmer need to know the tricks, non-documented features, quirks, and best practices of this powerful, adaptive language. This all-practical guide is stuffed with code recipes and keys to help you unlock the full potential of JavaScript. Start by diving right into the core of JavaScript, with power user techniques for getting better maintainability and performance from the basic building blocks of your code. Get to grips with modular programming to bring real power to the browser, master client-side JavaScript scripting without jQuery or other frameworks, and discover the full potential of asynchronous coding. Do great things with HTML5 APIs, including building your first web component, tackle the essential requirements of writing large-scale applications, and optimize JavaScript's performance behind the browser. Wrap up with in-depth advice and best practice for debugging and keeping your JavaScript maintainable for scaling, long-term projects. With every task demonstrated in both classic ES5 JavaScript and next generation ES6-7 versions of the language, Whether read cover-to-cover or dipped into for specific keys and recipes, JavaScript Unlocked is your essential guide for pushing JavaScript to its limits. This practice-oriented cookbook is packed full of code examples put in the problem, classical solution, and methods to optimize webpage in both JavaScript ES5 and ES6 language editions. But this thorough guide is best-suited to those who like to “learn by doing” as the topics are covered using real-life examples and tutorials.

182 pages, Paperback

Published December 7, 2015

Reviews

[Dmitry Sheiko · Rating 5 out of 5]

JavaScript is a great language and with the advent of Harmony (ES6-7 or ES2015) becomes outstanding one. It’s no more just a scripting language. JavaScript advances also in server scripting, desktop applications, native mobile programming, game development, DB querying, hardware control, and OS automating. It’s trendy. Yet, it has its “bad parts”, quirks and traps. One needs to know them to really enjoy the flexibility, expressiveness and the true power of the language. I’m happy about the opportunity to impart the technology insights, practices, tricks and recipes. I even hope to kindle your passion for the language.
So what is that book about? It starts from JavaScript core including such cool things like declaring types approaches, syntactic sugar, collection conversion and `magic` properties and methods. Then we dive in modular programming (AMD, CommonJS, ES6 modules and module transpiling). We get quick overview on getting the best performance on DOM operations. We examine most exiting features of HTML5 API (Web Storage, IndexDB, FileSystem, Web Components, SSE, Web-Sockets) . We consider JavaScript Event Loop and quirks of asynchronous programming. We look into principles of large-scale application architecture (MVC, MVP, MVVM, app examples with Backbone, Angular and React). We get brief walkthroughs on writing command-line script in JavaScript, building a web server with Node.js, making a desktop app and a native mobile application. Lastly we examine capacities of DevTools and less-known features of JavaScript Console API.

[Vlad Bezden · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers many aspects of JavaScript. It's not going to details, but give high level overview of different areas.