Nicolas Bevacqua - JavaScript Application Design: A Build First Approach

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The process of designing a robust JavaScript web app has gone through a roaring renaissance in recent years. With the language being used to develop increasingly ambitious apps and interfaces, this is the perfect time for JavaScript Application Design. Through concise examples, lessons learned from the field, and key concepts for scalable development, Nico Bevacqua will give you a whirlwind tour of taking the process and design of your apps to the next level.

This book will also help you craft build processes that will save you time. Time is a key factor in staying productive. As web app developers, we want to make the most of ours, and a Build First philosophy can help us hit the ground running with clean, testable apps that are well structured from the get-go. Learning process workflow and how to manage complexity are fundamental cornerstones of modern JavaScript app development. Getting them right can make a massive difference in the long run.

JavaScript Application Design will walk you through automation for the front end. It covers everything from avoiding repetitive tasks and monitoring production builds to mitigating the cost of human error through a clean tooling setup. Automation is a big factor here. If you arent using automation in your workflow today, youre working too hard. If a series of daily tasks can be accomplished with a single command, follow Nicos advice and spend the time you save improving the code quality of your apps.

Modularity is the final crucial concept that can assist with building scalable, maintainable apps. Not only does this help ensure that the pieces composing our application can be more easily tested and documented, it encourages reuse and focus on quality. In JavaScript Application Design, Nico expertly walks you through writing modular JavaScript components, getting asyncronous flow right, and enough client-side MVC for you to build an app of your own.

Strap on your seatbelts, adjust your command line, and enjoy a ride through the process of improving your development workflow.

A DDY O SMANI

S ENIOR E NGINEER WITH A PASSION FOR DEVELOPER TOOLING G OOGLE

Like most people in our field, Ive always been fascinated with problem solving. The painful thrill of hunting for a solution, the exhilarating relief of having found a fixtheres nothing quite like it. When I was young I really enjoyed strategy games, such as chess, which Ive played ever since I was a kid; StarCraft, a real-time strategy game I played for 10 years straight; and Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game that can be described as the intersection between poker and chess. They presented plenty of problem-solving opportunities.

At primary school I learned Pascal and rudimentary Flash programming. I was psyched. I would go on and learn Visual Basic, PHP, C, and start developing websites, reaping the benefits of a masterful handle on and tags, paired with a modest understanding of MySQL; I was unstoppable, but my thirst for problem solving didnt end there, and I went back to gaming.

Ultima Online (UO), a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (no wonder they abbreviate that as MMORPG), wasnt any different than other games that got me hooked for years. Eventually I found out that there was an open source[] implementation of the UO server, which was named RunUO and written entirely in C#. I played on a RunUO server where the administrators had no programming experience. They slowly started trusting me to handle minor bug fixes by literally emailing source code files back and forth. I was hooked. C# was a wonderful, expressive language, and the open source software for the UO server was amicable and invitingyou didnt even need an IDE (or even need to know what that was) because the server would compile script files dynamically for you. Youd be essentially writing a file with 10 to 15 lines in it, inheriting from the Dragon class, and adding an intimidating text bubble over their head, or overriding a method so theyd spit more fireballs. Youd learn the language and its syntax without even trying, simply by having fun!

You can check out the RunUO website at runuo.com, although the project isnt maintained anymore.

Eventually, a friend revealed that I could make a living out of writing C# code: You know, people actually pay you to do that, he said. Thats when I started developing websites again, except I wasnt using only Front Page and piles of tags or Java applets for fun anymore. It still feels like a game to me, though.

A few years ago I read The Pragmatic Programmer[], and something clicked. The book has a lot of solid advice, and I cant recommend it highly enough. One thing that particularly affected me: the authors advocate you get out of your comfort zone and try something youve been meaning to do but havent gotten around to. My comfort zone was C# and ASP.NET at that point, so I decided to try Node.js, an unmistakably UNIX-y platform for JavaScript development on the server side, certainly a break from my Microsoft-ridden development experience so far.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas (Addison Wesley, 1999) is a timeless classic you should seriously consider reading.

I learned a ton from that experiment and ended up with a blog[] where Id write about everything I learned in the process. About six months later Id decided that Id put my years of experience in C# design into a book about JavaScript. I contacted Manning, and they jumped at the opportunity, helping me brainstorm and turn raw ideas into something more deliberate and concise.