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
- A Brief History of JavaScript - We take a look at the evolution of JavaScript, arguably one of the most important languages of today, and tomorrow.
- The global object in Javascript - A matter of platforms, unreadable code and not breaking the internet.
- Semicolons in JavaScript: A preference - An argument for why use of semicolons in JavaScript source is a preference.
- The essence of Functional Programming in JavaScript - Recently I went through this fascinating article Professor Frisby’s mostly adequate guide to Functional Programming and would like to summarise my understanding.
Learning More
- Stepping into math: Open-sourcing our step-by-step solver - Our mission is to “make learning easy” where our app lets you take a picture of a homework question, and we teach you how to answer it — magic!
- Binding objects to functions - More than often, we need to bind an object to a function’s this object. JS uses the bind method when this is specified explicitly and we need to invoke desired method.
- 4 non-JavaScript library topics to learn to take your skills to the next level - There are more useful things to learn beyond the cool library of the year.
- Controlling time with Zone.js and FakeAsync - Traditional ways of testing async code fall short. By using Zone.js and fakeAsync, and as such by taking control of the time itself, we can make async tests more straightforward and reliable.
- Styled-Components - Enforcing best practices in component-based systems.
- Radial snake - How to implement a game engine in JavaScript and build a Tron-style game.
- How to set up functional testing for a web app from scratch in 5 minutes - We at TestCafe think that 5 minutes is more than enough. Seriously.
- Clean Code JavaScript - Software engineering principles, from Robert C. Martin’s book Clean Code, adapted for JavaScript. This is not a style guide. It’s a guide to producing readable, reusable, and refactorable software in JavaScript.
Libraries
- Dexterous - Mixed local and remote objects in less than 10 lines.
- Json-validity - Fast and simple JSON validator.
- Mitt - Tiny 200b functional event emitter / pubsub.
- highcharts-config - Declarative Highcharts configuration builder with an immutable, chainable API.
Frameworks
- Adventures with NPM or: How I learned to stop shrinkwrapping and love Yarn - The front end team here at Work Market began to notice some problems, both real and potential, in terms of how we were managing our dependencies in response to changes from package authors.
- 10 Node.js Best Practices: Enlightenment from the Node Gurus - Helping you take your Node skills to the next level.
- An Introduction to Gulp.js - Much of a developers job involves basic tasks which can sap your working day away from coding, if this is the case you need a task runner or build process.
- Virtual DOM is the new IR - It helps in compiling our code different platforms, even though it’s interpreted.
- 5 best JavaScript frameworks in 2017 - Lately JavaScript was named among the best programming languages to learn in 2017 by IBM. At this stage it is used on both client- and server-sides and helps to design flavorful interfaces.
React
- Internationalizing React apps - Focusing only front-end part, we’ll develop a simple universal React application with full internationalization support.
- Make a PWA with react, webpack and other stuff - A PWA is a hybrid between web pages and mobile applications.
- React at 60fps - Sometimes to achieve better performance (and better user experience) one has to think out of the box.
- React Calendar with Google Calendar as CMS — tutorial - Why not just use a Google calendar as a CMS?
- Tic-tac-toe game in React and Redux - In this article I will show what paradigms I kept in mind while I was building the 2-players tic-tac-toe game in React and Redux.
- Redux middleware - OO and functional way - Redux Middleware viewed from 2 different angles, one from the Object Oriented way and the other from the functional implemented in Redux source code.
Angular
- How to animate your angular application - Angular’s animation system lets you build animations that run with the same kind of native performance found in pure CSS animations. You can also tightly integrate your animation logic with the rest of your application code, for ease of control.
- Angular-2 module and route structures - It is important to create both modules and routes with good, clean separation of concerns in mind.
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.