Chapter 4. Improving Our Application

We've built a nice little application for our pet store. Now it's time to get fancy! We're going to explore some of the more advanced features CoffeeScript has to offer. These features let you write code that is very concise—code that says what you mean to do and skips all the boilerplate. These features also help you write safer, less buggy code by taking the best practices and idioms that the community has settled on and baking them right into the syntax.

Of course, we wouldn't want to learn these new CoffeeScript skills without putting them to use! As we go, we'll be adding more features to our application that make it more colorful and put our CoffeeScript into practice.

In this chapter, we will:

• Learn how to deal with values that might be undefined

• Learn new ways to assign values to variables

• Learn some advanced syntax for function arguments

• Add and display more rich information for our pets, like age and photos

• Let visitors filter the pet list by kind...