May 2008
Intermediate to advanced
172 pages
4h 54m
English
Content preview from JavaScript: The Good PartsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 10. Beautiful Features
Thus, expecting thy reply, I profane my lips on thy foot, my eyes on thy picture, and my heart on thy every part. Thine, in the dearest design of industry. . .
—William Shakespeare, Love's Labor's Lost
I was invited last year to contribute a chapter to Andy Oram's and Greg Wilson's Beautiful Code (O'Reilly), an anthology on the theme of beauty as expressed in computer programs. I wanted to write my chapter in JavaScript. I wanted to use it to present something abstract, powerful, and useful to show that the language was up to it. And I wanted to avoid the browser and other venues in which JavaScript is typecast. I wanted to show something respectable with some heft to it.
I immediately thought of Vaughn Pratt's Top Down Operator Precedence parser, which I use in JSLint (see Appendix C). Parsing is an important topic in computing. The ability to write a compiler for a language in itself is still a test for the completeness of a language.
I wanted to include all of the code for a parser in JavaScript that parses JavaScript. But my chapter was just one of 30 or 40, so I felt constrained in the number of pages I could consume. A further complication was that most of my readers would have no experience with JavaScript, so I also would have to introduce the language and its peculiarities.
So, I decided to subset the language. That way, I wouldn't have to parse the whole language, and I wouldn't have to describe the whole language. I called the subset Simplified ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.