Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
How often do you hear people say things like this? "Our JavaScript is a mess, but we re thinking about using framework of the month]."
Like it or not, JavaScript is not going away. No matter what framework or compiles-to-js language or library you use, bugs and performance concerns will always be an issue if the underlying quality of your JavaScript is poor. Rewrites, including porting to the framework of the month are terribly expensive and unpredictable. The bugs won t magically go away, and can happily reproduce themselves in a new context. To complicate things further, features will get dropped, at least temporarily.
The other popular method of fixing your JS is playing JavaScript Jenga, where each developer slowly and carefully takes their best guess at how the out-of-control system can be altered to allow for new features, hoping that this doesn t bring the whole stack of blocks down. This book provides clear guidance on how best to avoid these pathological approaches to writing JavaScript:
- Recognize you have a problem with your JavaScript quality.
- Forgive the code you have now, and the developers who made it.
- Learn repeatable, memorable, and time-saving refactoring techniques.
- Apply these techniques as you work, fixing things along the way.
- Internalize these techniques, and avoid writing as much problematic code to begin with.
Bad code doesn t have to stay that way. And making it better doesn t have to be intimidating or unreasonably expensive.
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Synopsis
If your JavaScript is a mess, frameworks can only do so much to help. No matter what framework, compiles-to-JS language, or library you use, bugs and performance concerns will always be an issue if the underlying quality of your JavaScript is poor. With this hands-on guide, you ll learn how test and refactor your existing code to help reduce complexity, improve readability, and gain confidence in the codebase.
Author Evan Burchard shows you how to identify areas of bad code, and then takes you through several refactoring methods for improving them. Techniques range from renaming variables to applying principles of functional and object-oriented programming. If you re motivated to write better JavaScript code either on the frontend or backend, this book is a must.
- Use refactoring to restructure existing code, without changing its behavior
- Learn the relationship between refactoring and quality
- Explore the many versions of JavaScript in use today
- Create automated tests to confirm that your code works, and find bugs that slip through
- Learn how to refactor simple JavaScript structures, functions, and objects
- Refactor your codebase by applying object-oriented and functional programming principles
- Examine methods for refactoring asynchronous JavaScript