With the advent of HTML5, front-end MVC, and Node.js, JavaScript is
ubiquitous--and still messy. This book will give you a solid foundation
for managing async tasks without losing your sanity in a tangle of
callbacks. It's a fast-paced guide to the most essential techniques for
dealing with async behavior, including PubSub, evented models, and
Promises. With these tricks up your sleeve, you'll be better prepared to
manage the complexity of large web apps and deliver responsive code.
With Async JavaScript, you'll develop a deeper understanding of the
JavaScript language. You'll start with a ground-up primer on the
JavaScript event model--key to avoiding many of the most common mistakes
JavaScripters make. From there you'll see tools and design patterns for
turning that conceptual understanding into practical code.
The concepts in the book are illustrated with runnable examples drawn
from both the browser and the Node.js server framework, incorporating
complementary libraries including jQuery, Backbone.js, and Async.js.
You'll learn how to create dynamic web pages and highly concurrent
servers by mastering the art of distributing events to where they need
to be handled, rather than nesting callbacks within callbacks within
callbacks.
Async JavaScript will get you up and running with real web development
quickly. By the time you've finished the Promises chapter, you'll be
parallelizing Ajax requests or running animations in sequence. By the
end of the book, you'll even know how to leverage Web Workers and AMD
for JavaScript applications with cutting-edge performance. Most
importantly, you'll have the knowledge you need to write async code with
confidence.
What You Need:
Basic knowledge of JavaScript is recommended. If you feel that you're
not up to speed, see the "Resources for Learning JavaScript" section in
the preface.
