Rediscovering Javascript

JavaScript is no longer to be feared or loathed - the world's most popular and ubiquitous language has evolved into a respectable language. Whether you're writing frontend applications or server side code, the phenomenal features from ES6 and beyond - like the rest operator, generators, destructuring, object literals, arrow functions, modern classes, promises, async, and metaprogramming capabilities - will get you excited and eager to program with JavaScript. You've found the right book to get started quickly and dive deep into the essence of modern JavaScript. Learn practical tips to apply the elegant parts of the language and the gotchas to avoid. JavaScript is a black swan that no one, including the author of the language, thought would become a popular and ubiquitous language. Not long ago, it was the most hated and feared language you could use to program the web. JavaScript ES6 and beyond has gone through a significant makeover. Troublesome features have been replaced with better, elegant, more reliable alternatives. This book includes many practical examples and exercises to help you learn in depth. It will not bore you with idiosyncrasies and arcane details intended for bad interview questions. Instead, it takes you into key features that you can readily use in your day-to-day projects. Whether you program the frontend or the server side, you can now write concise, elegant, and expressive JavaScript with newer features like default parameters, template literals, rest and spread operators, destructuring, arrow functions, and generators. Take it up a notch with features like infinite series, promises, async, and metaprogramming to create flexible, powerful, and extensible libraries. While the evolved features of the language will draw you in, the hundreds of examples in this book will pin the concepts down, for you to use on your projects. Take command of modern JavaScript and unlock your potential to create powerful applications. What You Need: To try out the examples in the book you will need a computer with Node.js, a text editor, and a browser like Chrome installed in it.

Upgrade your skillset, succeed at work, and above all, avoid the many headaches that come with modern front-end development. Simplify your codebase with hands-on examples pulled from real-life applications. Master the mysteries of asynchronous state management, detangle puzzling race conditions, and send spaceships soaring through the cosmos. When you finish this book, you'll be able to tame the wild codebeasts before they ever get a chance to wreck your day. The front-end world can be fraught with complexity. The RxJS library offers a solution: Observables. Observables merge other JavaScript asynch mechanisms such as callbacks and promises into a new way of looking at data. Instead of dealing with objects and keeping track of their state, Observables view asynchronous events as a stream. RxJS provides you the tools to manage, manipulate, and process Observables to simplify and speed up your front-end applications. Never fear, you're in exactly the right place. Don't worry about getting stuck in a mire of theory. Start off with the basics, building small applications that illustrate deeper points. Take those building blocks and apply them to much more complex problems like handling asynchronous state and dodging race conditions before they happen. Once you've got a handle on complex problems, take a leap into architecture, discovering how to structure an Observable-based application both without a framework and in the land of Angular 2. After mastering Observables, switch gears to building a canvas-based game, demonstrating your deep understanding of the flexibility of Observables. Master the Observable with RxJS, and make your asynchronous JavaScript code that much cleaner and simpler. What You Need: Any major browser and text editor, as well as the current versions of git, NodeJS, and npm.

Self-driving cars, natural language recognition, and online recommendation engines are all possible thanks to Machine Learning. Now you can create your own genetic algorithms, nature-inspired swarms, Monte Carlo simulations, cellular automata, and clusters. Learn how to test your ML code and dive into even more advanced topics. If you are a beginner-to-intermediate programmer keen to understand machine learning, this book is for you. Discover machine learning algorithms using a handful of self-contained recipes. Build a repertoire of algorithms, discovering terms and approaches that apply generally. Bake intelligence into your algorithms, guiding them to discover good solutions to problems. In this book, you will: Use heuristics and design fitness functions. Build genetic algorithms. Make nature-inspired swarms with ants, bees and particles. Create Monte Carlo simulations. Investigate cellular automata. Find minima and maxima, using hill climbing and simulated annealing. Try selection methods, including tournament and roulette wheels. Learn about heuristics, fitness functions, metrics, and clusters. Test your code and get inspired to try new problems. Work through scenarios to code your way out of a paper bag; an important skill for any competent programmer. See how the algorithms explore and learn by creating visualizations of each problem. Get inspired to design your own machine learning projects and become familiar with the jargon. What You Need: Code in C++ (>= C++11), Python (2.x or 3.x) and JavaScript (using the HTML5 canvas). Also uses matplotlib and some open source libraries, including SFML, Catch and Cosmic-Ray. These plotting and testing libraries are not required but their use will give you a fuller experience. Armed with just a text editor and compiler/interpreter for your language of choice you can still code along from the general algorithm descriptions.

Learn how to build apps for mobile devices on Cloud platforms The marketplace for apps is ever expanding, increasing the potential to make money. With this guide, you'll learn how to build cross-platform applications for mobile devices that are supported by the power of Cloud-based services such as Amazon Web Services. An introduction to Cloud-based applications explains how to use HTML5 to create cross-platform mobile apps and then use Cloud services to enhance those apps. You'll learn how to build your first app with HTML5 and set it up in the Cloud, while also discovering how to use jQuery to your advantage. Highlights the skills and knowledge you need to create successful apps for mobile devices with HTML5 Takes you through the steps for building web applications for the iPhone and Android Details how to enhance your app through faster launching, touch vs. click, storage capabilities, and a cache Looks at how best to use JSON, FourSquare, jQuery, AJAX, and more Shares tips for creating hybrid apps that run natively If you're interested in having your application be one of the 200,000+ apps featured in the iPhone store or the 50,000+ in the Android store, then you need this book.

You know what's even better than playing games? Programming your own! Make your own online games, even if you're an absolute beginner. Let your imagination come to 3D life as you learn real-world programming skills with the JavaScript programming language - the language used everywhere on the web. This new edition is completely revised, and takes advantage of new programming features to make game programming even easier to learn. Plus, new effects make your games even cooler. When you're done, you're going to be amazed at what you can create. Jump right in! Start programming cool stuff on page 1. Keep building new and different things until the very last page. This book wants you to play. Not just play games, but play with code. Play with programming. Because the best way to learn something is to have fun with it! This second edition is updated from start to finish to make it even easier to get started programming in JavaScript. Every example has been updated to make it easier, with new example games to explore and new 3D effects that make your games even more fun! Want a red donut? You can make hundreds of them, spinning around like mad. Want to create a star field? Make a hundred or a thousand stars. Make them red, green, or blue. Explosions? Fireworks? Planets? It's up to you. And, using a code editor created especially for this book, you'll program right in your web browser. You'll see the results of your work and imagination right away - right next to the code that you just typed! Along the way, you'll pick up a ton of programming knowledge, and dive in even deeper with some more advanced chapters. Whatever you want to do, this book has your back. Best of all, you get to create awesome games and say, "I made this!" What You Need: You need the latest version of the Google Chrome Web browser, available for free from https://chrome.google.com. You also need an Internet connection to access the ICE Code Editor the first time. ICE Code Editor will be loaded onto your computer, so you won't need Internet access for later projects.

ReasonML is a new, type-safe, functional language that compiles to efficient, readable JavaScript. ReasonML interoperates with existing JavaScript libraries and works especially well with React, one of the most popular front-end frameworks. Learn how to take advantage of the power of a functional language while keeping the flexibility of the whole JavaScript ecosystem. Move beyond theory and get things done faster and more reliably with ReasonML today. ReasonML is a new syntax for OCaml, a battle-tested programming language used in industry for over 20 years. Designed to be familiar to JavaScript programmers, ReasonML code compiles to highly readable JavaScript. With ReasonML, you get OCaml's powerful functional programming features: a strong static type system with an excellent type inference engine, pattern matching, and features for functional programming with immutable variables. ReasonML also allows flexibility with opt-in side effects, mutation, and object-oriented programming. ReasonML hits the sweet spot between the pure theoretical world and the laissez-faire approach of JavaScript. Start using ReasonML's powerful type system as you learn the essentials of the language: variables and arithmetic operations. Gain expressive power as you write functions with named parameters and currying. Define your own data types, and integrate all these capabilities into a simple web page. Take advantage of ReasonML's functional data structures with map and reduce functions. Discover new ways to write algorithms with ReasonML's recursion support. Interoperate with existing JavaScript libraries with bindings, and write reactive web applications using ReasonML in tandem with React. Reinforce concepts with examples that range from short, tightly focused functions to complete programs, and practice your new skills with exercises in each chapter.With ReasonML, harness the awesome power of a functional language while retaining the best features of JavaScript to produce concise, fast, type-safe programs. What You Need: You'll need to have node.js (version 10.0 or above) and npm (version 5.6 or above). Once you install the bs-platform package and fire up a text editor, you're ready to go. (There are plugins for many popular editors that will make editing easier.)

You work in a loop: write code, get feedback, iterate. The faster you get feedback, the faster you can learn and become a more effective developer. Test-Driven React helps you refine your React workflow to give you the feedback you need as quickly as possible. Write strong tests and run them continuously as you work, split complex code up into manageable pieces, and stay focused on what's important by automating away mundane, trivial tasks. Adopt these techniques and you'll be able to avoid productivity traps and start building React components at a stunning pace!

Why reinvent the wheel every time you run into a problem with JavaScript? This cookbook is chock-full of code recipes that address common programming tasks, as well as techniques for building web apps that work in any browser. Just copy and paste the code samples into your project—you’ll get the job done faster and learn more about JavaScript in the process. You'll also learn how to take advantage of the latest features in ECMAScript 5 and HTML5, including the new cross-domain widget communication technique, HTML5's video and audio elements, and the drawing canvas. You'll find recipes for using these features with JavaScript to build high-quality application interfaces. Create interactive web and desktop applications Work with JavaScript objects, such as String, Array, Number, and Math Use JavaScript with Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and the canvas element Store data in various ways, from the simple to the complex Program the new HTML5 audio and video elements Implement concurrent programming with Web Workers Use and create jQuery plug-ins Use ARIA and JavaScript to create fully accessible rich internet applications