About this book

Get Programming with JavaScript Next was written for JavaScript programmers looking to learn the modern features introduced in 2015 and later. Instead of focusing on a specific version such as ES2015 or ES2016, I wanted to focus on the best new features that a developer would run into and be expected to understand when thrown into a modern JavaScript development environment.

Who should read this book

Any programmer, no matter their skill level, should get a lot out of this book. This book doesn’t teach “how to program.” Readers are expected to be somewhat comfortable programming with classic JavaScript, but you don’t need to be an expert in JavaScript to follow along.

How this book is organized

This book is broken into cohesive units. Each unit follows a specific theme such as functions or asynchronous coding. Each unit is broken into lessons on a specific topic, and each lesson starts with a priming question designed to get your gears spinning in the right way before we start the lesson. Throughout each lesson, there will be quick checks to make sure you understand the core idea of a section before moving on. At the end of each lesson is an exercise to help you take what you’ve learned and apply it. At the end of each unit is a capstone project that you’ll build using everything you’ve learned throughout the unit.

About the code

This book contains many examples of source code both in numbered listings and inline with normal text. In both cases, source code is formatted in a fixed-width font like this to separate it from ordinary text. Sometimes code is also in bold to highlight code that has changed from previous steps in the chapter, such as when a new feature adds to an existing line of code.

In many cases, the original source code has been reformatted; we’ve added line breaks and reworked indentation to accommodate the available page space in the book. In rare cases, even this was not enough, and listings include line-continuation markers (). Additionally, comments in the source code have often been removed from the listings when the code is described in the text. Code annotations accompany many of the listings, highlighting important concepts.

The code used in this book may be accessed at the publisher’s website (https://www.manning.com/books/get-programming-with-javascript-next) or GitHub (https://github.com/jisaacks/get-programming-jsnext).

Book forum

Purchase of Get Programming with JavaScript Next includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the author and from other users. To access the forum, go to https://forums.manning.com/forums/get-programming-with-javascript-next. You can also learn more about Manning’s forums and the rules of conduct at https://forums.manning.com/forums/about.

Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the author can take place. It is not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the author, whose contribution to the forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the author some challenging questions, lest his interest stray! The forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.

Online resources

You can keep up to date with the features of JavaScript at https://github.com/tc39/ecma262. Here you can see what features are at what stage in the proposal process. We talk about how these stages and proposals work later in this book.