Hello and welcome to This Week in JavaScript, our lovingly curated collection of links relating to what’s new and exciting in the world of JS. The complete list is tagged jsweekly. (Don’t forget to check out our weekly .NET and front end roundups too!)
And now for this week’s JavaScript finds …
Getting Started
- My giant JavaScript Basics course is now live on YouTube. And it’s 100% free. – Beau Carnes - These videos are designed to quickly give you key information on each topic. Also, I designed them to be as modular as possible. They work fine as stand-alone videos, if you just want to learn about a single topic.
Learning More
- TheJSQuiz - A free interactive JS quiz for all levels - Test your level of knoweldge, with beginner, intermediate, and advanced forms of the quiz.
- Curried Functions in JavaScript - A curried function is one that takes many parameters and returns a function with a fixed arity of 1.
- Why you shouldn’t use ‘in’ in javascript - The first time I used it I was expecting a behavior more like includes, just because the word “in” is very suggestive to inform you whether is something in something else that contains it.
Libraries
- Top 5 jQuery Plugins for Tree View - Tree view is a tree-like representation of data. It is ideal for some of the web applications as it allows users to navigate to the information easily and quickly.
- How to Build a User Tour With Shepherd in JavaScript - Guide users through your app using Tether to position all of its steps.
- Moon - Moon is a minimal, blazing fast library for building user interfaces.
- Make Your Website Interactive and Fun with Velocity.js (No jQuery) - Use Velocity.js to create your own animations and make your website more interactive and user-friendly.
- Three.js: The Basics - Three.js is an easy to use, lightweight, JavaScript 3D library. It provides many renderers such as canvas and WebGL.
ES6 / ES2015
- Why ES6 (ES2015) Classes Are Not Awesome - A curated list of resources on why ES6 (aka ES2015) classes are NOT awesome.
Frameworks
- Decentralizing the Internet with Serverless Single Page JavaScript Apps (video) - introduce the building blocks available to add decentralized features into javascript apps - including payments, identity, authentication, storage, directories, and more.
- NodeJS and Good Practices - Separation of concerns doesn’t need to be boring.
- Prettier - Prettier is an opinionated JavaScript formatter.
React
- React Workshops 02: Understanding the React Component State and Life-cycle (video) - React components have several “Life-cycle Methods” that you can override to run code at particular times in the process.
- Higher Order Components (video) - Since the component keyword and the hash helper were introduced to the framework, a whole new realm of APIs has become possible.
- Iceberg v2 - Front-End Boilerplate built with React + Babel + Webpack + SASS
- D3.js books to make epic visualizations - D3.js can be combined with Reactjs, allowing you to make elegant applications with beautiful visualizations. These D3.js books should get you started on the right path to building epic data visualizations. Bookmark and check back to stay updated with the best books in the world of D3.js!
- Stateful functional React components without runtime overhead - Because functional components are concise and it’s annoying to write ES2015 classes when all you need is local state.
Testing / Debugging
- Learning JavaScript Test-Driven Development by Example - What TDD is and what benefits it brings to you as a developer. We’ll use TDD to implement a form validator, which ensures that any values input by the user conform to a specified set of rules.
- Debugging tips and tricks - A compilation of tips and tricks that I rely on pretty heavily.
- Quick and dirty tricks for debugging Javascript - Here are a few debugging tricks that have served me well, I hope they’ll be of some use for you as well (just don’t accidentally commit any of this).
For more links like this and to keep up-to-date with the latest goings on in JS land, you can follow SitePoint’s JavaScript channel on Twitter.
Please PM us if you have anything of interest for the next issue or if there is anything you would like to see featured. Paul and chrisofarabia.