Hello and welcome to This Week in JavaScript—a lovingly curated collection of links relating to what’s new and exciting in the world of JS. The complete list is tagged jsweekly. (Don’t forget to check out our weekly .NET and front end roundups too!)
And now it’s on with the show …
This week the news has been all about Voyager reaching Pluto, and among all of the articles one of my favourite has to be this NASA piece on The Icy Mountains of Pluto.
Reading material
- How to Join a Major Open Source Project - How SitePoint JavaScript co-editor Aurelio De Rosa joined the jQuery team.
- The Front-End Developer’s Dilemma - I tell people I do web design for a living, because that’s mostly what people understand.
- Ligatures & Coding - On using ligatures in your font to help improve readability of your code.
- Pure UI - How we can go from go from sketch to design to implementation with ease.
Learning more
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Alternative ways to pass a callback to a function in Javascript - Alternatives to passing a callback function to another function.
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New in Understanding ECMAScript 6: Promises! - Events and callbacks weren’t powerful enough to support everything that developers wanted to do. Promises are the solution to this problem.
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ES6 Promise Patterns & Anti-Patterns - Some of the best practices, patterns and anti-patterns to avoid.
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Optimising a canvas animation - Adjusting the framerate so that you don’t end up maxing out the CPU.
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Coding exercises - Some basic and advanced javascript coding challenges and interview questions.
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Eric S. Elliot’s list of Essential JavaScript Links - An exclusive collection of must-have JavaScript links.
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Sublime Text packages for front-end development - Recommended JavaScript related packages for you to enjoy in your text editor.
Libraries
- jQuery 3.0 (alpha) - With a few breaking changes to justify the major version bump, but hopefully they won’t affect too many people.
- BAFluidView - UIView that simulates a 2D view of a fluid in motion.
- Building a JavaScript Autocomplete Widget with Awesomplete - How to use the Awesomplete JavaScript library to create an autocomplete widget in our websites.
- You might not need underscore - While it might make the code easier for you to write, it’s not necessarily simpler or easier to understand.
Frameworks
- How to write a React component - A walkthrough on the process that’s used.
- Handling User Authentication with the MEAN Stack
- React UI Builder - A visual builder of React JS components for your web application.
Testing
CoolHot stuff
- A sneezing dragon
A neural network with only 11 lines of Python - A bare bones neural network implementation to describe the inner workings of backpropagation.
I hope you’ve enjoyed working through these links. If you want more links like this and to keep up-to-date with the latest goings on in JS land, you can follow SitePoint’s JavaScript channel on Twitter.
Please PM us if you have anything of interest for the next issue or if there is anything you would like to see featured. Paul and Pullo.