ES6 (short for ECMAScript 2015), is the sixth version of ECMAScript, which is a general-purpose, cross-platform, and vendor-neutral programming language. ECMAScript is defined in ECMA Standard (ECMA-262) by Ecma International. Most of the time, ECMAScript is more commonly known by the name JavaScript.

Understanding ES6 is the key to writing web applications using modern JavaScript. Owing to the scope of this book, we will only cover the basics of new features introduced in ES6 here as you will see them in the rest of the book.