CoffeeScript Application Development

by Ian Young

In Detail

JavaScript is becoming one of the key languages in web development. It is now more important than ever across a growing list of platforms. CoffeeScript puts the fun back into JavaScript programming with elegant syntax and powerful features.

CoffeeScript Application Development will give you an in-depth look at the CoffeeScript language, all while building a working web application. Along the way, you'll see all the great features CoffeeScript has to offer, and learn how to use them to deal with real problems like sprawling codebases, incomplete data, and asynchronous web requests.

Through the course of this book you will learn the CoffeeScript syntax and see it demonstrated with simple examples. As you go, you'll put your new skills into practice by building a web application, piece by piece. You'll start with standard language features such as loops, functions, and string manipulation. Then, we’ll delve into advanced features like classes and inheritance. Learn advanced idioms to deal with common occurrences like external web requests, and hone your technique for development tasks like debugging and refactoring.

CoffeeScript Application Development will teach you not only how to write CoffeeScript, but also how to build solid applications that run smoothly and are a pleasure to maintain.

Approach

CoffeeScript Application Development is a practical, hands-on guide with step-by-step instructions. Follow the smooth and easy tutorial approach, covering examples that build in complexity. By the final chapter you'll be wondering why you didn't try CoffeeScript sooner.

Who this book is for

If you are a JavaScript developer who wants to save time and add power to your code, then this is the book that will help you do it. With minimal fuss you will learn a whole new language which will reduce your application development time from weeks to days.

260 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

Reviews

[Jack Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never heard of CoffeeScript ever before never-mind wrote it. But the first page started of by saying what it is and where it's used. It also says how it's different from other languages which I was interested in because I didn't actually know there was a different way for code to be compiled.

So who is this book for? This isn't a beginners book by no means, it is however a beginners book for CoffeeScript however you need to have some experience in Web Design under your belt before you will start to understand this book. This is because CoffeeScript is a web application language and when it is compiled it isn't compiled to machine code, instead it's compiled into JavaScript so you can see why it's useful to know Javascript.

However don't let it put you off, if you're interested in Web Applications then you'll be interested in CoffeeScript and you can easily jump onto Code Academy or W3Schools and learn the basics of both JavasScript and HTML.

In the first section of the book it's going to teach you how to install CoffeeScript on Linux, Mac and Windows so don't fear if you think your operating system isn't compatible. After the book has taught you how to install CoffeeScript you are then set to write your first program. If you've ever programmed before you'll find the layout is very similar to other languages and follows the same principles - it wouldn't surprise me if you managed to pick it up quickly. The second section looks at everything you need to know when coding in this language. It teaches you Comments, If statements, loops, arrays, unless statements and everything you'll need to get started.

In the third section you will start to develop your very first web application in CoffeeScript. The first application they create is 'Ians Pet Shop' and as the book goes through the author adds improvements and new features to his application as he goes along showing you every step of the way.

By the end of the book you will have the knowledge to go and start creating your own Web applications. If you need a CoffeeScript Book then this is the one you should buy if you are just starting out and want to learn more. The author explains things in depth and helps you every step of the way showing you what he's doing and why he's doing it. I give this book a 5/5 as it is very well laid out in a step by step process and you can clearly see code separate from instructions.

[Ianl · Rating 5 out of 5]

this books is an excellent introduction to coffeescript. opening with some base features to ease into the syntax, he builds logically and incrementally from basic examples to more fully realized application examples. as a ruby user, the syntax made a lot of sense to me, but i was still impressed by how ian explained certain concepts for those that may not have a familiarity with some more modern languages. in addition to building your coffeescript knowledge progressively, ian also takes the time to point out how the use of coffeescript can help avoid potential pitfalls in javascript, with context of when this pitfalls could occur.

overall, it was a pleasure to read, with a conversational tone that made the material come easily. i highly recommend it for anyone thinking of trying out coffeescript (which i would in turn also highly recommend). note that the book does expect the reader to have some background in javascript (as that is what coffeescript compiles down to), and that it is not designed for a reader with no programming experience.

check it out at http://goo.gl/5WtQdg

[Jason Titus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book did a good job of explaining how to use Coffeescript and after reading it I felt it would be something I'd like to use on a project some time soon. You can find my full review here, but overall I'd recommend you check this book out if you are doing javascript development: http://titusj.blogspot.com/2013/11/re...

[Christopher Bartling · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had the opportunity to read CoffeeScript Application Development by Ian Young recently and thought I would put together a book review.

The author does a nice job describing why parentheses are required for executing CoffeeScript no-argument functions. This is an idiom that I have seen many developers trip over when first coming to CoffeeScript. CoffeeScript preserves JavaScript’s view of functions as first-class citizens. Parentheses are optional except when necessary to avoid ambiguity.

The author gives some nice examples of loop comprehensions, one of the snazzier features of CoffeeScript. Loop comprehensions come from Python and they make for a more readable way to iterate a list and selectively act on list elements which meet a certain criteria. I’m always looking for more examples of loop comprehensions in CoffeeScript and this book has some nice examples.

The CoffeeScript switch statement is explained thoroughly. This is a handy flow-control statement that works really well in its incarnation in CoffeeScript. There are numerous examples in the book where different usage scenarios are demonstrated. Very handy and welcomed.

I found the author’s treatment of classes and inheritance in CoffeeScript to be a nice, gentle introduction. The examples that are given in the book work well and the explanations that accompany the examples are clear and concise. It would have been nice to get an explanation of the boilerplate code that CoffeeScript generates for you when defining a class, but I guess that’s considered part of the magic of CoffeeScript. It isn’t until the discussion on inheritance that the author starts to poke his head under the hood to investigate the generated JavaScript. The inheritance discussion is extremely valuable and a big plus for this book. If you get this book for anything, it’s for this discussion. CoffeeScript is doing a whole bunch of interesting stuff when creating classes and implementing inheritance, and this is one of the first times that I have seen the generated JavaScript described line by line.

In typical fashion, the author introduces the fat arrow syntax in a gentle manner, clearly explaining the reasoning for such a feature. The author then gives a very good explanation why you should not overuse the fat arrow syntax in your CoffeeScript (hint, it’s due to memory usage). He also includes a very succinct definition and example around memoization in CoffeeScript. This is a feature that I have not had much exposure to, so it was great to see it described and used in an example.

IcedCoffeeScript is introduced in the chapter on Going Asynchronous. I have not used IcedCoffeeScript, so that was an interesting exploration into an extension to CoffeeScript for managing asynchronous invocations. Looks interesting.

The topic of debugging CoffeeScript is broached. This is an interesting subject, as I have seen a few developers really get frustrated with the mapping of generated JavaScript back to the original CoffeeScript. Luckily the author introduces source maps, which does this work for us. The author shows us how to set this feature up in Firefox and Chrome developer tools. Your mileage will vary on this feature, but it is an interesting tool for easing the inertia of moving to CoffeeScript. This discussion comes with a lot of screenshots that help you understand how the source maps feature can be used in the developer tools.

Overall I really liked this book and it’s a worthy addition to my other documentation on CoffeeScript.
Link to the book

[Nikolay · Rating 5 out of 5]

CoffeeScript Application Development, the book I read lately, helped me to take overall look at the language I have recently used on a number of projects. Like many books about programming languages it is also divided into chapters which follow you from the very beginning — tools installation and basic syntax to more advanced topics like classes and asynchronous operations. The book also covers such things as debugging, using the language for server-side development and adopting it for usage with different JS-frameworks.

Each topic of a book goes with a number of examples clearly showing how to use specific CoffeeScript features and what code will look like after compilation into JavaScript. The only thing I found ineffective is a way how author presented the example application. Its progress was mixed within the material treatment. For me as a person who read a book without immediate trying and following examples by hand it has been difficult to get a sense of this examples. I would rather move this example application into separate appendix and make cross-links on related topics. Thus the material treatment could be more consistent and at the same time the example application could be more readable and perceptive.

I would definitely recommend this book for reading people who find annoying such things in JS as checking curly braces parenthesis, frequently testing variables on existence and maintaining code written using different code conventions.

After reading I have got obvious feeling that CoffeeScript makes code much clearer and understandable allowing to explain things in a very concise way in comparison with bare JavaScript and as the result it makes code better maintainable. As soon as ease of maintainability is one of the corner stones of software development in modern realities the profit from usage CoffeeScript excessively covers spending time on its learning and getting on usage.

You can find this book here: http://goo.gl/5WtQdg

[Julio Biason · Rating 4 out of 5]

In these days of ECMAScript 6, it's nice to see where a bunch of ideas of it came from.

Coffee is a lot like the new JavaScript standard (just a bit more brackets). The book manages to explain and show all the little nice things about it, keeping a single application from start to finish, which helps a lot in understanding the flows of it.

I just got a bit miffed with the upbeat tone of the book. It's not a full Pollyanna, but a lot of "that looks a lot cleaner, don't it?" and "It's even prettier than normal Javascript" gets into you pretty quick.