Hello and welcome to ‘This Week in JavaScript’ — another curated collection of links relating to what’s new and exciting in the world of JavaScript. 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 finds …
Getting started
- Why I Use a JavaScript Style Guide and Why You Should Too - Let’s take a look at JavaScript Standard Style by @feross, a JavaScript style guide that’s gaining popularity. It may help you reduce friction on teams and increase programmer happiness.
- So You Want to be a Functional Programmer (Part 1) - Taking that first step to understanding Functional Programming concepts is the most important and sometimes the most difficult step. But it doesn’t have to be. Not with the right perspective.
- Yes, You Should Learn Vanilla JavaScript Before Fancy JS Frameworks - Francois-Xavier P. Darveau took enough time to understand the core principles of JavaScript before using shortcuts provided by JS frameworks and libraries. And why is that important? Well, this is what this post is about: not just pretending.
- Debugging Production JavaScript - The web can be a hostile place and our JavaScript apps will inevitably break for some users. When it does, we need to be ready.
Learning more
- Binding Methods to Class Instance Objects - There’s a number of different ways we can ensure class methods have access to this. After some controversy on Twitter last week, Nicolás Bevacqua goes over the most common approaches, discussing their advantages and drawbacks.
- The art of writing small and plain functions - This article covers best practices how to write plain, understandable and easy to test functions.
- Get Query String Parameters with JavaScript - The only method you have to access the query string is via the window.location.search property but you don’t get each property within one object, you get one string that represents the entire query string.
- How Do You Start a New Web Design Project? - I come bearing good news! For those of you who didn’t hear yet (where’ve you been?) SitePoint recently launched a new podcast: The Versioning Show.
Libraries
- 10 jQuery Panorama Image Display Plugins - Let your visitors enjoy the 360 degrees view of your website images by integrating these cool jQuery Panorama Image Display plugins. Possible uses include Virtual Tours, Panorama Viewers/Scrolling, Image cubes, Endless Photo Sliders and more.
- argon.js - An open-standards augmented reality platform for the web.
- Guide: How to use Vue.js with jQuery Plugins - Working with Vue can be awesome. But you might know that it can also give you headaches, when you try to combine it with jQuery plugins or other libraries.
ES6
- ES proposal: Template Literal Revision - The ECMAScript proposal “Template Literal Revision” by Tim Disney is currently at stage 3. It proposes to give the innards of tagged template literals more syntactic freedom.
- ES proposal: Function.prototype.toString revision - The ECMAScript proposal “Function.prototype.toString revision” by Michael Ficarra is currently at stage 3.
- ES6 Block Scope is The new IIFE - You can probably see where let and const are going to be useful: if you need to scope something to a block, or if you want to make a variable that cannot be changed by accident or on purpose. Wes Bos takes a look at a couple of more examples of when it might be useful.
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Babili (babel-minify) - Babili can accept ES2015+ input, while current minifiers are mostly limited to ES5, requiring code to be transpiled before minification.
##React/Redux - Building Animated Components, or How React Makes D3 Better - D3 is great. As the jQuery of the web data visualization world, it can do everything you can think of.
- React Components Catalog - A catalog of React components / libraries.
- Some Thoughts On Testing React/Redux Applications - On Component and Reducer Tests, Asynchronous Actions and Generative Testing.
- Still don’t understand why you need Redux? Read this… - The hope is that after reading this article you will be one step closer to figuring our why Redux is one of the coolest things since sliced bread.
Other Frameworks
- JavaScript Frameworks: Distribution Channels for Good Ideas - In business, as in everything, having a good idea is not enough. Getting that good idea in front of people, and making it as easy as possible for them to adopt, is the real trick.
- Controlling the Node.js security risk of npm dependencies - Inevitably, using npm packages will expose you to security risks. Fortunately, there are several questions you can ask which can reduce your risk substantially. This post outlines these questions, and how to get them answered.
- Build a secure API with Auth0, ExpressJS and AngularJs - The estimated reading time for this post is 6 seconds. (their words, not mine…)
- Scanning Barcodes with NativeScript and Angular 2 - In this article, we’re going to see how to store fictional product data in a NoSQL database and look it up by scanning a barcode.
- Three Ways to Test Angular 2 Components - In this article we will look at three ways to test Angular components: isolated tests, shallow tests, and integration tests.
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Building a WordPress-Powered Front End With the WP REST API and AngularJS: The Posts, Categories, and Users Controllers - In this concluding part of the series, we will work on the remaining portion of our application and build controllers for post listing, single post, author, and the category page.
##Other Stuff - qualified.io - The first assessment software with a collaborative IDE and real testing frameworks that developers love. From those awfully nice Codewars people. PS: It’s not free…
- The Building Blocks Of Progressive Web Apps - Here, you will be able to find some do’s and dont’s on how to make a progressive web app, as well as resources for further research.
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 Chris of Arabia.