Adam Boduch - Lo-Dash Essentials

Joe Grund is a full-stack software engineer. He has written numerous rich applications utilizing the latest technologies and methodologies. Joe enjoys writing terse JavaScript code in a functional style and building real-time systems. He works at Intel, where he uses JavaScript to solve interesting problems. He lives in Orlando and can be found on Twitter (@joegrund), GitHub (jgrund), and his blog (joegrund.com), where he muses about building complex systems out of simple functional primitives.

I would like to thank my wife, Sunshine, and my three awesome kids, Luke, Lilly, and Michael, for their love and support.

Richard Hubers is an all-round web developer with more than 15 years of experience. He likes writing web apps and APIs in JavaScript and .NET, and learning the newest and latest technologies. He lives and works in Amsterdam.

Tyler Morgan is a renowned Ruby developer. He loves the JavaScript landscape, especially Node.js. He is an instructor of an intensive full-stack JavaScript development course at Code Fellows, located in Seattle, Washington.

Francois-Guillaume Ribreau is a full-stack developer and French entrepreneur. Currently the CTO of @Bringr and @Redsmin, he also teaches NoSQL, software architecture, JavaScript, and RIA in engineering schools. In his spare time, he reviews books, releases open source libraries (github.com/FGRibreau), and shares his discoveries on Twitter (@FGRibreau).

Matt Traynham is a Java, JavaScript, and Python developer fascinated by cutting-edge technologies. He has worked on a variety of projects, including but not limited to content management, Big Data, machine learning, statistics, and full-text search. He regularly contributes to his GitHub account at https://github.com/mtraynham.

I'd like to thank my wife and best friend, Pamela, who doesn't get mad at me when I'm glued to my laptop.

At times, JavaScript can be a frustrating programming language to work with. Just when you think you have it entirely figured out, performance or cross-browser issues reveal themselves in the worst possible way. Lo-Dash is just one of many libraries that aim to help JavaScript programmers write code that's elegant, efficient, and portable. Underscore.js introduced a better way to perform functional programming with JavaScript. Lo-Dash is a continuation of this effort, and throughout this book, we'll see what sets Lo-Dash apart from other libraries out there, including Underscore.

At its heart, JavaScript is a functional language, but not necessarily a pure functional languageyou can modify variables and introduce side effects. However, functions are first-class citizens and you can do a lot with them. Lo-Dash embraces this idea and gives programmers all the tools they need to write functional code that's readable and maintainable. All the cool things you can do with higher-order functions in other languages are possible with Lo-Dash as well.

It's not just the low-level utilities and performance gains that Lo-Dash delivers, though these are always welcome; it's also the enhanced programming model and the ideas that Lo-Dash borrows from other languages such as functional and applicative programming. These are imparted to JavaScript applications as a coherent API. Underscore got the ball rolling, and Lo-Dash further enhances these ideas, albeit using different design and implementation strategies.