Chapter 2. Organizing Code
In this chapter, we'll look at how to organize JavaScript code into reusable, understandable chunks. The language doesn't lend itself well to this sort of modularization, but a number of methods of organizing JavaScript code have emerged over the years. This chapter will argue the need to break down code, and then work through the methods of creating JavaScript modules.
We will cover the following topics:
- Global scope
- Objects
- Prototype inheritance
- ECMAScript 6 classes
Chunks of code
The first thing anybody learns to program is the ubiquitous hello world application. This simple application prints some variation of "hello world" to the screen. Depending on who you ask, the phrase hello world dates back to the early 1970s where it is used to demonstrate the B programming language, or even to 1967 where it appears in a BCL programming guide. In such a simple application, there is no need to worry about the structure of code. Indeed in many...