Hi there!
We are going to be building some really interesting applications with JavaScript in this book. JavaScript has evolved from being a simple scripting language that is used for form validation in browsers to a powerful programming language that is used practically everywhere. Check out these use cases:
- Want to set up a server to handle millions of requests with a lot of I/O operations? You have Node.js with its single threaded non-blocking I/O model that can handle the heavy load with ease. Write JavaScript on the server with Node.js frameworks, such as Express or Sails.
- Want to build a large scale web application? This is an exciting time to be a frontend developer, since lots of new JavaScript frameworks, such as React, Angular 2, Vue.js, and so on, are available to speed up your development process and build large scale applications easily.
- Want to build a mobile app? Pick up React Native or NativeScript and you can build truly native mobile applications that work across both iOS and Android with a single codebase written in JavaScript. Not enough? Use PhoneGap or Ionic to simply create a mobile application with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Just like a web app!
- Want to build a desktop app? Use Electron to build a cross-platform native desktop application using HTML, CSS, and of course, JavaScript.
- JavaScript is also playing an important role in building Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) applications. Check out React VR, A-Frame for building WebVR experiences and Argon.js, AR.js for adding AR to your web applications.
JavaScript is also evolving rapidly. With the introduction of ECMAScript 2015 (ES6), a lot of new additions came into the language that simplify a lot of work for developers, providing them with features that were previously only possible using TypeScript and CoffeeScript. Even more, features are being added to JavaScript in its new specifications (ES7 and beyond). This is an exciting time to be a JavaScript developer and this book aims at building a solid foundation so that you can adapt to any of the earlier mentioned JavaScript platforms/frameworks in the future.
This chapter is targeted at readers who know the basic concepts of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but are yet to learn new topics, such as ES6, Node, and so on. In this chapter, the following topics will be covered:
- Document Object Model (DOM) manipulation and event listeners
- Introduction to and the practical usage of the ES6 implementation of JavaScript
- Using Node and npm for frontend development
- Using Babel to transpile ES6 to ES5
- Setting up an automated development server with npm scripts
If you feel you are comfortable with these topics, you can jump over to the next chapter, where we will be dealing with some advanced tools and concepts.
