Introduction

I wrote this book for the benefit of developers who have familiarized themselves with the JavaScript language and who want to take their knowledge to the next level, to become professional JavaScript developers. As I see it, there are three aspects to modern JavaScript development: Coding, Capabilities, and Tooling. Because I believe that these topics are intertwined, rather than divide the book into three distinct sections, these threads run through every chapter. My mission is to help you create the highest quality, most maintainable, scalable, and efficient code you can, taking advantage of modern coding techniques, capabilities, and tooling to help you get there.

As you follow through the material in this book, your coding skills should improve; you’ll learn the details of JavaScript objects, about context, scope, prototypes, and inheritance, as well as the latest updates to the language that have landed in the major browsers. You’ll also learn all about design patterns, how to comment your code in the best way for your project team, and how to boost the performance of your running code.

You’ll discover capabilities of the language that you may not have been familiar with previously, including native APIs for drawing and building games that run in the browser, that allow for plugin-free video chat, and others specifically for mobile device development.

Developers are taking advantage of tools and automation more than ever to help their development workflow and improve the quality of the code that they produce. In this book, you’ll discover how to check code quality, how to auto-generate a documentation website from your code, how to run a series of tasks on your code to improve your day-to-day workflow and to package your code up for release to the public, and, finally, how to use the developer tools built into the major browsers to help debug and profile your code as it runs in place.

By the end of this book, you should have the knowledge and experience to be a professional JavaScript developer, capable of building applications that are high-quality, maintainable, scalable, and efficient.

Let’s get started!