The landscape of the JavaScript language has changed quite a bit since the release of the ECMAScript 2015 standard. There are now many new features that make JavaScript a first-class language for all types of development. It has become much easier to use the language, and we can even see some syntactic sugar in it now.

From the ECMAScript 2015 standard and beyond, we have received classes, modules, more ways of declaring variables, variations of scope, and much more. All of these features and more are going to be explained throughout the rest of this chapter. This is an excellent chapter to read in full if you are new to the language or you may just want to check out the features that may be unfamiliar. We will also take a look at some older sections of the web with DOM queries and how we can utilize them to replace extraneous libraries that we may be currently using, such as jQuery.

In this chapter, the following topics will be covered:

• A dive into modern JavaScript
• Understanding classes and modules
• Working with the DOM
• Understanding the Fetch API