Introduction

For many years JavaScript has been frowned upon and looked down on by many developers due to its quirky nature, obscure behaviors and many WTFs that populate its hairy APIs and operations.

Frown upon no more! For with modern design patterns, libraries, tools and the long awaited ECMAScript 6 (ES6, ES2015) writing JavaScript is now a pleasure.

Join me at the school of JavaScript-mancy as we travel along the modern landscape of writing JavaScript in 2015 and beyond, as we discover the organic evolution of this beautiful language and its thriving ecosystem, and delve in the latest features/spells/incantations of the JavaScript Arcana.

You my friend, can no longer ignore JavaScript. JavaScript is the most deployed language on earth, a beautiful and expressive language that supports many paradigms and which has a thriving community that continuously expands and improves its ecosystem with patterns, libraries, frameworks and tools. You don’t want to miss this train.

But JavaScript, though forgiving and specially conceived to be easy to learn, can be either daunting for us that have a strongly-typed mindset and come from languages such as C# or Java or, more often, laughed at as a toy.

For you who consider it daunting and hate working with it worry not! I will show you the most common misconceptions and all the patterns you need to know to become as fluent in JavaScript as you are in C#.

For you who consider it a toy language, something associated not with real programming but with copy-paste coding or scripting to add flare to websites, I will show you all the different patterns and programming paradigms that JavaScript supports and which make it just as good and powerful as C#.

Let’s get started!