▶Book Description
Building robust apps starts with creating clean code. In this book, you'll explore techniques for doing this by learning everything from the basics of JavaScript through to the practices of clean code. You'll write functional, intuitive, and maintainable code while also understanding how your code affects the end user and the wider community.
The book starts with popular clean-coding principles such as SOLID, and the Law of Demeter (LoD), along with highlighting the enemies of writing clean code such as cargo culting and over-management. You'll then delve into JavaScript, understanding the more complex aspects of the language. Next, you'll create meaningful abstractions using design patterns, such as the Class Pattern and the Revealing Module Pattern. You'll explore real-world challenges such as DOM reconciliation, state management, dependency management, and security, both within browser and server environments. Later, you'll cover tooling and testing methodologies and the importance of documenting code. Finally, the book will focus on advocacy and good communication for improving code cleanliness within teams or workplaces, along with covering a case study for clean coding.
By the end of this book, you'll be well-versed with JavaScript and have learned how to create clean abstractions, test them, and communicate about them via documentation.
▶What You Will Learn
- Understand the true purpose of code and the problems it solves for your end-users and colleagues
- Discover the tenets and enemies of clean code considering the effects of cultural and syntactic conventions
- Use modern JavaScript syntax and design patterns to craft intuitive abstractions
- Maintain code quality within your team via wise adoption of tooling and advocating best practices
- Learn the modern ecosystem of JavaScript and its challenges like DOM reconciliation and state management
- Express the behavior of your code both within tests and via various forms of documentation
▶Key Features
- Write maintainable JS code using internal abstraction, well-written tests, and well-documented code
- Understand the agents of clean coding like SOLID principles, OOP, and functional programming
- Explore solutions to tackle common JavaScript challenges in building UIs, managing APIs, and writing states
▶Who This Book Is For
This book is for anyone who writes JavaScript, professionally or otherwise. As this book does not relate specifically to any particular framework or environment, no prior experience of any JavaScript web framework is required. Some knowledge of programming is assumed to understand the concepts covered in the book more effectively.
▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, Setting the Scene, asks you to consider why we write code and explores the many ways in which we communicate our intent via code. This chapter provides a firm foundation upon which you can build and adapt your understanding of clean code.
- Chapter 2, The Tenets of Clean Code, uses real-world JavaScript examples to explore the four tenets of clean code: reliability, efficiency, maintainability, and usability. Each of these vital tenets serves as a foundation for the rest of the book.
- Chapter 3, The Enemies of Clean Code, uncovers some of the more notorious enemies of clean code. These are the forces and dynamics that lead to the proliferation of unclean code, such as egotistic programming, bad metrics, and cargo cults.
- Chapter 4, SOLID and Other Principles, explores the famous SOLID principles and uncovers their deeper meaning by tying them together with functional programming principles, the Law of Demeter, and the abstraction principle.
- Chapter 5, Naming Things Is Hard, discusses one of the most challenging aspects of programming: naming things. It poses some of the specific challenges of naming and ties together a foundational naming theory with real-world naming problems and solutions.
- Chapter 6, Primitive and Built-In Types, begins a deep exploration into JavaScript. This chapter details the primitive and built-in types available to the JavaScript programmer, warning against common pitfalls and sharing best practices.
- Chapter 7, Dynamic Typing, discusses JavaScript's dynamic nature, and goes over some of the challenges related to this. It explains how we can both cleanly detect and convert to various types (via explicit casting or implicit coercion).
- Chapter 8, Operators, thoroughly details the operators available within JavaScript, discussing their behaviors and challenges. This includes a detailed account of every operator alongside examples, pitfalls, and best practices.
- Chapter 9, Parts of Syntax and Scope, provides a more macro view of the language, highlighting the broader syntaxes and constructs available, such as statements, expressions, blocks, and scope.
- Chapter 10, Control Flow, broadly covers the concept of control flow, highlighting the crucial difference between imperative and declarative forms of programming. It then explores how we can cleanly control flow within JavaScript by utilizing control-moving mechanisms such as invoking, returning, yielding, throwing, and more.
- Chapter 11, Design Patterns, broadly explores some of the more popular design patterns used in JavaScript. It describes the major architectural design patterns of MVC and MVVM, and the more modular design patterns such as the Constructor pattern, the Class pattern, the Prototype pattern, and the Revealing Module pattern.
- Chapter 12, Real-World Challenges, looks at some of the more realistic problem domains within the JavaScript ecosystem and considers how they can be handled cleanly. Topics covered include the DOM and single-page applications, dependency management, and security (XSS, CSRF, and more).
- Chapter 13, The Landscape of Testing, describes the broad concepts of testing software, and how these can be applied to JavaScript. It specifically explores unit testing, integration testing, E2E testing, and TDD.
- Chapter 14, Writing Clean Tests, delves further into the domain of testing by advising you to author assertions and test suites in a way that is utterly clear, intuitive, representative of the problem domain, and conceptually hierarchical.
- Chapter 15, Tools for Cleaner Code, briefly considers several available tools and development flows that can greatly aid us in writing and maintaining clean code. Included are topics such as linting, formatting, source control, and continuous integration.
- Chapter 16, Documenting Your Code, uncovers the unique challenges of documentation. This chapter challenges you to consider all the mediums of documentation that are available and asks you to consider how we can understand and accommodate the needs and questions of individuals who may wish to utilize or maintain our code.
- Chapter 17, Other Peoples' Code, looks into the challenges of selecting, understanding, and making use of third-party code within our JavaScript projects (such as third-party libraries, frameworks, and utilities). It also discusses methods of encapsulation that allow us to interface with third-party code in a clean and minimally invasive way.
- Chapter 18, Communication and Advocacy, explores the wider project-based and interpersonal challenges inherent in the crafting and delivery of clean software. This includes a detailed inquiry into the following: planning and setting requirements, communication strategies, and identifying issues and driving change.
- Chapter 19, Case Study, concludes the book with a walk-through of the development of a JavaScript project, including both client-side and server-side pieces. This chapter draws together the principles espoused within the book and affirms them by exposing you to a real-world problem domain and the development of a usable solution.
