Functional programming (or FP) has been around since the earliest days of computing, and is going through a sort of revival because of its increased use with several frameworks and libraries, most particularly in JavaScript (JS). In this chapter, we shall do the following:
- Introduce some concepts of FP to give a small taste of what it means.
- Show the benefits (and problems) implied by the usage of FP and why we should use it.
- Start thinking about why JavaScript can be considered an appropriate language for FP.
- Go over the language features and tools that you should be aware of in order to fully take advantage of everything in this book.
By the end of this chapter, you'll have the basic tools that we'll be using in the rest of the book, so let's get started by learning about functional programming.