This concise book shows JavaScript developers how to build superb web applications with CoffeeScript, the remarkable language that’s gaining considerable interest. Through example code, this guide demonstrates how CoffeeScript abstracts JavaScript, providing syntactical sugar and preventing many common errors. You’ll learn CoffeeScript’s syntax and idioms step by step, from basic variables and functions to complex comprehensions and classes. Written by Alex MacCaw, author of JavaScript Web Applications (O’Reilly), with contributions from CoffeeScript creator Jeremy Ashkenas, this book quickly teaches you best practices for using this language—not just on the client side, but for server-side applications as well. It’s time to take a ride with the little language that could. Discover how CoffeeScript’s syntax differs from JavaScript Learn about features such as array comprehensions, destructuring assignments, and classes Explore CoffeeScript idioms and compare them to their JavaScript counterparts Compile CoffeeScript files in static sites with the Cake build system Use CommonJS modules to structure and deploy CoffeeScript client-side applications Examine JavaScript’s bad parts—including features CoffeeScript was able to fix

This concise book shows JavaScript developers how to build superb web applications with CoffeeScript, the remarkable language that's gaining considerable interest. Through example code, this guide demonstrates how CoffeeScript abstracts JavaScript, providing syntactical sugar and preventing many common errors. You'll learn CoffeeScript's syntax and idioms step by step, from basic variables and functions to complex comprehensions and classes. Written by Alex MacCaw, author of JavaScript Web Applications (O'Reilly), with contributions from CoffeeScript creator Jeremy Ashkenas, this book quickly teaches you best practices for using this language--not just on the client side, but for server-side applications as well. It's time to take a ride with the little language that could. Discover how CoffeeScript's syntax differs from JavaScript Learn about features such as array comprehensions, destructuring assignments, and classes Explore CoffeeScript idioms and compare them to their JavaScript counterparts Compile CoffeeScript files in static sites with the Cake build system Use CommonJS modules to structure and deploy CoffeeScript client-side applications Examine JavaScript's bad parts--including features CoffeeScript was able to fix

This concise book shows JavaScript developers how to build superb web applications with CoffeeScript, the remarkable language that's gaining considerable interest. Through example code, this guide demonstrates how CoffeeScript abstracts JavaScript, providing syntactical sugar and preventing many common errors. You'll learn CoffeeScript's syntax and idioms step by step, from basic variables and functions to complex comprehensions and classes.

Use CoffeeScript to Write Better JavaScript Code Than Ever Before! If you can do it in JavaScript, you can do it better in CoffeeScript. And, since CoffeeScript "compiles down" to JavaScript, your code will fit neatly into virtually any web environment. In Programming in CoffeeScript, Mark Bates shows web developers why CoffeeScript is so useful and how it avoids the problems that often make JavaScript code buggy and unmanageable. He guides you through every feature and technique you need to write quality CoffeeScript code and shows how to take advantage of CoffeeScript's increasingly robust toolset. Bates begins with the absolute basics of running and compiling CoffeeScript and then introduces syntax, control structures, functions, collections, and classes. Through same page code comparisons, you'll discover exactly how CoffeeScript improves on JavaScript. Next, you'll put it to work in building applications that are powerful, flexible, maintainable, concise, reliable, and secure. Bates shares valuable tips for better development, illuminating CoffeeScript's hidden gems and warning you about its remaining "rough edges." The book concludes with a start-to-finish application case study showing how to code back-ends and front-ends and integrate powerful frameworks and libraries. Coverage includes Understanding the right ways to compile and execute CoffeeScript Using CoffeeScript's clean syntax to focus on your code, not JavaScript's distractions Working with CoffeeScript's control structures, functions, and arguments Taking full advantage of CoffeeScript's implementation of collections and iterators Leveraging CoffeeScript's full class support to create complex data models Automating common application development tasks with Cake and Cakefiles Configuring Jasmine with CoffeeScript support, and using it to systematically test your code Writing Node.js server-side applications in CoffeeScript Using CoffeeScript to write jQuery and Backbone.js applications Integrating framework code to avoid "reinventing the wheel" Want a better way to create the JavaScript code your web applications need? CoffeeScript is the solution-and this book will help you master it!

JavaScript Allongé solves two important problems for the ambitious JavaScript programmer. First, JavaScript Allongé gives you the tools to deal with JavaScript bugs, hitches, edge cases, and other potential pitfalls. There are plenty of good directions for how to write JavaScript programs. If you follow them without alteration or deviation, you will be satisfied. Unfortunately, software is a complex thing, full of interactions and side-effects. Two perfectly reasonable pieces of advice when taken separately may conflict with each other when taken together. An approach may seem sound at the outset of a project, but need to be revised when new requirements are discovered. When you “leave the path” of the directions, you discover their limitations. In order to solve the problems that occur at the edges, in order to adapt and deal with changes, in order to refactor and rewrite as needed, you need to understand the underlying principles of the JavaScript programming language in detail. You need to understand why the directions work so that you can understand how to modify them to work properly at or beyond their original limitations. That’s where JavaScript Allongé comes in. JavaScript Allongé is a book about programming with functions, because JavaScript is a programming language built on flexible and powerful functions. JavaScript Allongé begins at the beginning, with values and expressions, and builds from there to discuss types, identity, functions, closures, scopes, and many more subjects up to working with classes and instances. In each case, JavaScript Allongé takes care to explain exactly how things work so that when you encounter a problem, you’ll know exactly what is happening and how to fix it. Second, JavaScript Allongé provides recipes for using functions to write software that is simpler, cleaner, and less complicated than alternative approaches that are object-centric or code-centric. JavaScript idioms like function combinators and decorators leverage JavaScript’s power to make code easier to read, modify, debug and refactor, thus avoiding problems before they happen. JavaScript Allongé teaches you how to handle complex code, and it also teaches you how to simplify code without dumbing it down. As a result, JavaScript Allongé is a rich read releasing many of JavaScript’s subtleties, much like the Café Allongé beloved by coffee enthusiasts everywhere. License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Source is available from Github * https://github.com/justinkelly/javascript-allonge

This elegant programming primer teaches K-12 students to code through more than 100 graded examples, each one illustrated in color. The second edition includes an appendix with a tutorial in CoffeeScript. Written by a computer scientist to teach his own children to program, the book is designed for inductive learning. The illustrated programs come with no expository text. Instead, the sequence of projects introduce increasingly sophisticated concepts by example. Each one invites customization and exploration. The book begins by suggesting a simple program to draw a line. Subsequent pages introduce core concepts in computer science: loops, functions, recursion, input and output, numbers and text, and data structures. The more advanced material introduces concepts in randomness, animation, HTML5, jQuery, networking, and artificial intelligence.

Developers looking to keep their JavaScript code bug-free will want to unit test using Jasmine, one of the most popular unit testing frameworks around. Any project of meaningful size should be automatically tested to help catch bugs as early as possible. Jasmine, a testing framework for JavaScript, makes it easy to test JavaScript projects, from browser-based applications to Node.js. While a quick understanding of Jasmine can be gleaned from the project’s homepage, the framework has a lot of details and exciting plugins. This book explores Jasmine in a depth that can’t be found elsewhere. This book provides: Exposure to some Jasmine plugins, to extend Jasmine and allow for more functionality and more thorough testing An Understanding of Jasmine’s main features, to allow code to be automatically tested and reduce bugs An Explanation of how to get Jasmine working in different environments (in the browser, in Node.js, through Rails, et cetera), to make Jasmine easier to work with