2017 JavaScript Tips, Tricks, and Tools for Everyday Web Development: A blog about JavaScript development for the every-day web developer.
It’s a new year, which means a new chance to learn something new, or sharpen your toolset. Let’s take a look at some of the most exciting, interesting, and useful open source projects from the past year that support JavaScript development!
Author: John Au-Yeung
2017 JavaScript Tips, Tricks, and Tools for Everyday Web Development
A blog about JavaScript development for the every-day web developer.
JavaScript continues to be an evolving language with new syntax and features added regularly. But not all of these new features are supported by all major browsers and tools. In this article, I want to go through some tips, tricks, and tools that can help you write better JavaScript code in 2017. These are up-to-date at the time of writing this article (December 2016).
I will update this article when newer versions of ECMAScript comes out or when there are newer ways to write better JavaScript code.
You know how it feels when you find a new tool or library that makes writing JavaScript easier? You feel like you just gained super powers.
This blog is dedicated to sharing tips, tricks, and tools that will make JavaScript development a little bit easier for you, the everyday web developer.
Tooling is constantly changing and evolving. New libraries are being released on a daily basis. It’s impossible to keep up with everything, but this blog will aim to help you stay up-to-date with the latest and greatest in the JavaScript world.
I’m not a super technical person who can write about the latest concepts in functional programming. I’m an every-day web developer who loves JavaScript and wants to share what I’ve learned from my experience as a web developer over the last 10 years. The target audience for this blog are every-day web developers like me!
Welcome to the 2017 JavaScript tips and tricks blog post! This year, we’ve divided our list into two sections: Tips and Tricks and Tools. The first half of this post will cover JavaScript tips and tricks, while the second half will focus on tools that can help you work with your code more efficiently. Let’s get started!
JavaScript Tips and Tricks
1. Declare a variable using let instead of var
use let instead of var when declaring variables. By doing so, you’re telling JavaScript that this variable can only be accessed within the block it is declared in.
Using let instead of var helps protect your code from unintended consequences by limiting the scope of a variable to its intended use. Additionally, it prevents you from accidentally changing or overwriting values in your code.
By limiting the scope of your variables, you keep other parts of your program from unintentionally modifying them. This reduces the risk for errors in your program by keeping all variables within their intended scope.
2. Declare unchangeable variables using const
You can prevent changes to variables’ values by declaring them as constants using const. Doing so gives you an additional level of reassurance that these variables are not being inadvertently modified elsewhere in your code.
JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world.
Yet, with all of this popularity, many people don’t fully understand how JavaScript works. Often times, developers will throw jQuery at a problem and hope that things work out. With this approach, it’s easy to have spaghetti code that’s difficult to maintain and even more difficult to debug.
The best way of learning JavaScript is by writing it. And if you’re looking for new practice projects, check out these cool JavaScript projects for developers.
I didn’t start out as a JavaScript developer. I was what you call a “back-end” engineer; I worked on APIs, databases, and server management. It seemed like the natural progression of taking my hobby and turning it into a career.
Then one day, the project manager on my team asked me to help him with an application that he was writing. The app, which allowed users to upload photos of their pets and have them rated by other users, was written in AngularJS. One of our engineers was out sick and they needed someone to cover for him while he recovered.
I told my project manager that I knew nothing about JavaScript, but he insisted that I could do it. After all, how hard could it be?
The codebase turned out to be a disaster; it had no tests and wasn’t even organized in any sensible way. I spent several days fighting with the codebase before finally figuring out what was going on. From there, I started refactoring the codebase and making improvements to its test suite.
After two weeks of working on this application, I had several pull requests open against its GitHub repo, all passing their tests and ready for review. But none of my coworkers were interested in reviewing them—they were
JavaScript is the most widely used scripting language on Earth. It’s a dynamic, untyped, lightweight, interpreted language with first-class functions. JavaScript is prototype-based with first-class functions, making it a multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented, imperative and functional programming styles.
It has an API for working with text, arrays, dates and regular expressions, but does not include any I/O, such as networking, storage or graphics facilities. JavaScript engines allow developers to embed scripts in or to attach scripts to the HTML documents and interact with the Document Object Model (DOM). This enables programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment.
JavaScript is also used in environments that are not web-based, such as PDF documents, site-specific browsers and desktop widgets. Newer and faster JavaScript virtual machines (VMs) and platforms built upon them have also increased the popularity of JavaScript for server-side web applications. On the client side, developers have traditionally implemented JavaScript as an interpreted language, but more recent browsers perform just-in-time compilation.