Dan Mantyla - Functional Programming in JavaScript

Dom Derrien is a full stack web developer who has recently been defining application environments with a focus on high availability and scalability. He's been in the development field for more than 15 years and has worked for big and small companies and as an entrepreneur.

He's currently working for the game company Ubisoft, where he defines the next generation services platform for its successful AAA games. To extend the gamer experience on to the Web and on mobiles, he provides technical means that are transparent, efficient, and highly flexible.

Having developed smart clients before the introduction of XHR, using a frameset tag to keep the context and a hidden frame of size=0 to dynamically exchange data with servers, he had a great pleasure of reviewing this book, which pushes the language to its limits. He hopes that it will help developers improve their programming skills.

I want to thank my wife, Sophie, and our sons, Erwan and Goulven, with whom I enjoy a peaceful life in Montral, Qubec, Canada.

Joe Dorocak , whose Internet moniker is Joe Codeswell, is a very experienced programmer. He enjoys creating readable code that implements project requirements efficiently and in a manner that can be easily understood. He considers writing code akin to writing poetry.

Joe prides himself on the ability to communicate clearly and professionally. He considers his code to be communication, not only with the machine platforms on which it runs, but also with human programmers who might read it in the future.

Joe has worked as an employee as well as in a contractual role for major brands such as IBM, HP, GTE/Sprint, and other top-shelf companies. He is presently consulting on web, mobile, and desktop applications, which are coded primarily, but not exclusively, in Python and JavaScript. For more details about him, please visit https://www.linkedin.com/in/joedorocak.

Peter Ehrlich taught himself web programming in 2007, and now works on performance JavaScript and WebGL at Leap Motion, Inc. In his spare time, he enjoys dancing, rock climbing, and taking naps.

Edward E. Griebel Jr. has been developing enterprise software for over 20 years in C, C++, and Java. He has a bachelor of science degree in computer engineering. He is currently a middleware architect at a leading payroll and financial services provider in the U.S., focusing on systems integration and UI and server development.

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Preface

Functional programming is a style that emphasizes and enables the writing of smarter code, which minimizes complexity and increases modularity. It's a way of writing cleaner code through clever ways of mutating, combining, and using functions. JavaScript provides an excellent medium for this approach. JavaScript, the Internet's scripting language, is actually a functional language at heart. By learning how to expose its true identity as a functional language, we can implement web applications that are powerful, easier to maintain, and more reliable. By doing this, JavaScript's odd quirks and pitfalls will suddenly become clear and the language as a whole will make infinitely more sense. Learning how to use functional programming will make you a better programmer for life.

This book is a guide for both new and experienced JavaScript developers who are interested in learning functional programming. With a focus on the progression of functional programming techniques, styles, and detailed information about JavaScript libraries, this book will help you to write smarter code and become a better programmer.