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 roundup too!)
Getting started
This week we start off with why learning to Code is so damn hard before finding out more about standardization and the open web. Before we get in to more about coding with JavaScript, we need to ask if everyone has JavaScript, right? I’m getting more and more impressed with what is being done without JavaScript lately too. See for example this 3D rotating book effect that was put together by our Alex Walker, our design editor that’s done entirely using CSS - no JS is needed at all.
Other than being able to run JavaScript, language is another barrier that can get in your way too, so a very basic HTML multilingual support using JavaScript has been developed to help get you under way. You may also have heard a lot about using jQuery when it comes to JavaScript, but for some
jQuery is considered harmful.
Regardless of where your opinion falls on that though, we all need to know
the basics of variable scope in JavaScript, and as you learn about Common Misconceptions About Inheritance in JavaScript, your projects grow in size and complexity so these Javascript design pattern video tutorials may help you to organise things to better handle such growth.
Libraries
Of the libraries that we came across this week, some small but effective ones are Layzr.js, a fast, modern, and dependency-free library for lazy loading images, and Sprint.js is a lightning fast jQuery-like library for modern browsers.
During Easter some of us were using eggs.js add easter eggs to web pages based on watching keystrokes, and Elevator.js which provides the old-fashioned elevator experience while scrolling to the top, incliding musak while you get there. More usefully though you can animate your ‘action-to-effect’ paths with cta.js.
Graphic libraries were big this week too, with an article here on how to create data visualizations in JavaScript using Dimple and D3]27, and if you want to try other ones there’s the the big list of HTML5 3D games engines]12. As an interesting example to explore, D3 and jsfeat.js were recently used to make Kubist, a little web app to make cubism-like images.
Frameworks
In the world of frameworks, React has been gathering quite some attention this week. There’s a useful intro to React with this article on React to the future with isomorphic apps, a series of examples on how to TDD React, React Inline to extract out CSS declarations from your code, and perhaps taking things too far is FluxThis which helps to keep you on track by yelling at you when you fail to follow good design patterns.
Other frameworks to gain attention this week have been Node, with Part 2 on Basic Routing, this jQuery to AngularJS Paradigm Switch, and an amusing video asking what do goats, hipster, AngularJS and JSON Schema have in common? about an open source form generation tool called Angular Schema Form.
ES6 and Testing
This week eith ES6 we get to learn more about ES6 arrow functions, syntax and lexical scoping, delve in to ES6 destructuring. It’s been amazing too to these full details on all of the ES6 features.
Elsewhere on testing, there’s this article on the philosophy of testing JavaScript, the importance of doing code reviews, and Elijah has an interesting presentation on how to eliminate JavaScript code smells, and the slides for eliminate JavaScript code smells.
And lastly
A cute Asian girl shows us exactly how robots would eat breakfast.
I hope you’ve enjoyed working through these links. Before I leave you, might I remind you to check out SitePoint’s official JavaScript newsletter which you can subscribe to here: http://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/
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.