JavaScript allows single line or multiple line comments. The syntax is similar to C or Java:

// a one line comment
 
/* this is a longer, 
   multi-line comment
 */
 
/* You can't /* nest comments */ SyntaxError */

Variables are symbolic names for values. The names of variables, or identifiers, must follow certain rules.

A JavaScript variable name must start with a letter, underscore (_), or dollar sign ($); subsequent characters can also be digits (0-9). As JavaScript is case sensitive, letters include the characters A through Z (uppercase) and the characters a through z (lowercase).

You can use ISO 8859-1 or Unicode letters in variable names.

New variables in JavaScript should be defined with the var keyword. If you declare a variable without assigning a value to it, its type is undefined by default. One terrible thing is that if you don't declare your variable with the var keyword, they become implicit globals. Let me reiterate that implicit globals are a terrible thing—we will discuss this in detail later in the book when we discuss variable scopes and closures, but it's important to remember that you should always declare a variable with the var keyword unless you know what you are doing:

var a;      //declares a variable but its undefined
var b = 0;
console.log(b);    //0
console.log(a);    //undefined
console.log(a+b);  //NaN

The NaN value is a special value that indicates that the entity is not a number.

You can create a read-only named constant with the const keyword. The constant name must start with a letter, underscore, or dollar sign and can contain alphabetic, numeric, or underscore characters:

const area_code = '515';

A constant cannot change the value through assignment or be redeclared, and it has to be initialized to a value.

JavaScript supports the standard variations of types:

The Number type can represent both 32-bit integer and 64-bit floating point values. For example, the following line of code declares a variable to hold an integer value, which is defined by the literal 555:

var aNumber = 555;

To define a floating point value, you need to include a decimal point and one digit after the decimal point:

var aFloat = 555.0;

Essentially, there's no such thing as an integer in JavaScript. JavaScript uses a 64-bit floating point representation, which is the same as Java's double.

Hence, you would see something as follows:

EN-VedA:~$ node
> 0.1+0.2
0.30000000000000004
> (0.1+0.2)===0.3
false

I recommend that you read the exhaustive answer on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588004/is-floating-point-math-broken) and (http://floating-point-gui.de/), which explains why this is the case. However, it is important to understand that floating point arithmetic should be handled with due care. In most cases, you will not have to rely on extreme precision of decimal points but if you have to, you can try using libraries such as big.js (https://github.com/MikeMcl/big.js) that try to solve this problem.

If you intend to code extremely precise financial systems, you should represent $ values as cents to avoid rounding errors. One of the systems that I worked on used to round off the Value Added Tax (VAT) amount to two decimal points. With thousands of orders a day, this rounding off amount per order became a massive accounting headache. We needed to overhaul the entire Java web service stack and JavaScript frontend for this.

A few special values are also defined as part of the Number type. The first two are Number.MAX_VALUE and Number.MIN_VALUE, which define the outer bounds of the Number value set. All ECMAScript numbers must fall between these two values, without exception. A calculation can, however, result in a number that does not fall in between these two numbers. When a calculation results in a number greater than Number.MAX_VALUE, it is assigned a value of Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY, meaning that it has no numeric value anymore. Likewise, a calculation that results in a number less than Number.MIN_VALUE is assigned a value of Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY, which also has no numeric value. If a calculation returns an infinite value, the result cannot be used in any further calculations. You can use the isInfinite() method to verify if the calculation result is an infinity.

Another peculiarity of JavaScript is a special value called NaN (short for Not a Number). In general, this occurs when conversion from another type (String, Boolean, and so on) fails. Observe the following peculiarity of NaN:

EN-VedA:~ $ node
> isNaN(NaN);
true
> NaN==NaN;
false
> isNaN("elephant");
true
> NaN+5;
NaN

The second line is strange—NaN is not equal to NaN. If NaN is part of any mathematical operation, the result also becomes NaN. As a general rule, stay away from using NaN in any expression. For any advanced mathematical operations, you can use the Math global object and its methods:

> Math.E
2.718281828459045
> Math.SQRT2
1.4142135623730951
> Math.abs(-900)
900
> Math.pow(2,3)
8

You can use the parseInt() and parseFloat() methods to convert a string expression to an integer or float:

> parseInt("230",10);
230
> parseInt("010",10);
10
> parseInt("010",8); //octal base
8
> parseInt("010",2); //binary
2
> + "4"
4

With parseInt(), you should provide an explicit base to prevent nasty surprises on older browsers. The last trick is just using a + sign to auto-convert the "42" string to a number, 42. It is also prudent to handle the parseInt() result with isNaN(). Let's see the following example:

var underterminedValue = "elephant";
if (isNaN(parseInt(underterminedValue,2))) 
{
   console.log("handle not a number case");
}
else
{
   console.log("handle number case");
}

In this example, you are not sure of the type of the value that the underterminedValue variable can hold if the value is being set from an external interface. If isNaN() is not handled, parseInt() will cause an exception and the program can crash.

In JavaScript, strings are a sequence of Unicode characters (each character takes 16 bits). Each character in the string can be accessed by its index. The first character index is zero. Strings are enclosed inside " or '—both are valid ways to represent strings. Let's see the following:

> console.log("Hippopotamus chewing gum");
Hippopotamus chewing gum
> console.log('Single quoted hippopotamus');
Single quoted hippopotamus
> console.log("Broken \n lines");
Broken
 lines

The last line shows you how certain character literals when escaped with a backslash \ can be used as special characters. The following is a list of such special characters:

You get default support for special characters and Unicode literals with JavaScript strings:

> '\xA9'
'©'
> '\u00A9'
'©'

One important thing about JavaScript Strings, Numbers, and Booleans is that they actually have wrapper objects around their primitive equivalent. The following example shows the usage of the wrapper objects:

var s = new String("dummy"); //Creates a String object
console.log(s); //"dummy"
console.log(typeof s); //"object"
var nonObject = "1" + "2"; //Create a String primitive 
console.log(typeof nonObject); //"string"
var objString = new String("1" + "2"); //Creates a String object
console.log(typeof objString); //"object"
//Helper functions
console.log("Hello".length); //5
console.log("Hello".charAt(0)); //"H"
console.log("Hello".charAt(1)); //"e"
console.log("Hello".indexOf("e")); //1
console.log("Hello".lastIndexOf("l")); //3
console.log("Hello".startsWith("H")); //true
console.log("Hello".endsWith("o")); //true
console.log("Hello".includes("X")); //false
var splitStringByWords = "Hello World".split(" ");
console.log(splitStringByWords); //["Hello", "World"]
var splitStringByChars = "Hello World".split("");
console.log(splitStringByChars); //["H", "e", "l", "l", "o", " ", "W", "o", "r", "l", "d"]
console.log("lowercasestring".toUpperCase()); //"LOWERCASESTRING"
console.log("UPPPERCASESTRING".toLowerCase()); //"upppercasestring"
console.log("There are no spaces in the end     ".trim()); //"There are no spaces in the end"

JavaScript allows multiline strings also. Strings enclosed within ` (Grave accent—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent) are considered multiline. Let's see the following example:

> console.log(`string text on first line
string text on second line `);
"string text on first line
string text on second line "

This kind of string is also known as a template string and can be used for string interpolation. JavaScript allows Python-like string interpolation using this syntax.

Normally, you would do something similar to the following:

var a=1, b=2;
console.log("Sum of values is :" + (a+b) + " and multiplication is :" + (a*b));

However, with string interpolation, things become a bit clearer:

console.log(`Sum of values is :${a+b} and multiplication is : ${a*b}`);

JavaScript indicates an absence of meaningful values by two special values—null, when the non-value is deliberate, and undefined, when the value is not assigned to the variable yet. Let's see the following example:

> var xl;
> console.log(typeof xl);
undefined
> console.log(null==undefined);
true

JavaScript Boolean primitives are represented by true and false keywords. The following rules govern what becomes false and what turns out to be true:

JavaScript Booleans are tricky primarily because the behavior is radically different in the way you create them.

There are two ways in which you can create Booleans in JavaScript:

Both these methods return expected truthy or falsy values. However, if you create a Boolean object using the new operator, things can go really wrong.

Essentially, when you use the new operator and the Boolean(value) constructor, you don't get a primitive true or false in return, you get an object instead—and unfortunately, JavaScript considers an object as truthy:

var oBooleanTrue = new Boolean(true);
var oBooleanFalse = new Boolean(false);
console.log(oBooleanTrue); //true
console.log(typeof oBooleanTrue); //object
if(oBooleanFalse){
 console.log("I am seriously truthy, don't believe me");
}
>"I am seriously truthy, don't believe me"

if(oBooleanTrue){
 console.log("I am also truthy, see ?");
}
>"I am also truthy, see ?"

//Use valueOf() to extract real value within the Boolean object
if(oBooleanFalse.valueOf()){
 console.log("With valueOf, I am false");  
}else{
 console.log("Without valueOf, I am still truthy");
}
>"Without valueOf, I am still truthy"

So, the smart thing to do is to always avoid Boolean constructors to create a new Boolean object. It breaks the fundamental contract of Boolean logic and you should stay away from such difficult-to-debug buggy code.

One of the problems with using reference types to store values has been the use of the typeof operator, which returns object no matter what type of object is being referenced. To provide a solution, you can use the instanceof operator. Let's see some examples:

var aStringObject = new String("string");
console.log(typeof aStringObject);        //"object"
console.log(aStringObject instanceof String);    //true
var aString = "This is a string";
console.log(aString instanceof String);     //false

The third line returns false. We will discuss why this is the case when we discuss prototype chains.

JavaScript does not have a date data type. Instead, you can use the Date object and its methods to work with dates and times in your applications. A Date object is pretty exhaustive and contains several methods to handle most date- and time-related use cases.

JavaScript treats dates similarly to Java. JavaScript store dates as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00.

You can create a Date object using the following declaration:

var dataObject = new Date([parameters]);

The parameters for the Date object constructors can be as follows:

Here are some examples on how to create and manipulate dates in JavaScript:

var today = new Date();
console.log(today.getDate()); //27
console.log(today.getMonth()); //4
console.log(today.getFullYear()); //2015
console.log(today.getHours()); //23
console.log(today.getMinutes()); //13
console.log(today.getSeconds()); //10
//number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC
console.log(today.getTime()); //1432748611392
console.log(today.getTimezoneOffset()); //-330 Minutes

//Calculating elapsed time
var start = Date.now();
// loop for a long time
for (var i=0;i<100000;i++);
var end = Date.now();
var elapsed = end - start; // elapsed time in milliseconds
console.log(elapsed); //71

For any serious applications that require fine-grained control over date and time objects, we recommend using libraries such as Moment.js (https://github.com/moment/moment), Timezone.js (https://github.com/mde/timezone-js), or date.js (https://github.com/MatthewMueller/date). These libraries simplify a lot of recurrent tasks for you and help you focus on other important things.

The + operator, when used as a unary, does not have any effect on a number. However, when applied to a String, the + operator converts it to numbers as follows:

var a=25;
a=+a;            //No impact on a's value  
console.log(a);  //25

var b="70";
console.log(typeof b); //string
b=+b;           //converts string to number
console.log(b); //70
console.log(typeof b); //number

The + operator is used often by a programmer to quickly convert a numeric representation of a String to a number. However, if the String literal is not something that can be converted to a number, you get slightly unpredictable results as follows:

var c="foo";
c=+c;            //Converts foo to number
console.log(c);  //NaN
console.log(typeof c);  //number

var zero="";
zero=+zero; //empty strings are converted to 0
console.log(zero);
console.log(typeof zero);

We will discuss the effects of the + operator on several other data types later in the text.

The ++ operator is a shorthand version of adding 1 to a value and -- is a shorthand to subtract 1 from a value. Java and C have equivalent operators and most will be familiar with them. How about this?

var a= 1;
var b= a++;
console.log(a); //2
console.log(b); //1

Err, what happened here? Shouldn't the b variable have the value 2? The ++ and -- operators are unary operators that can be used either prefix or postfix. The order in which they are used matters. When ++ is used in the prefix position as ++a, it increments the value before the value is returned from the expression rather than after as with a++. Let's see the following code:

var a= 1;
var b= ++a;
console.log(a);  //2
console.log(b);  //2

Many programmers use the chained assignments to assign a single value to multiple variables as follows:

var a, b, c;
a = b = c = 0;

This is fine because the assignment operator (=) results in the value being assigned. In this case, c=0 is evaluated to 0; this would result in b=0, which also evaluates to 0, and hence, a=0 is evaluated.

However, a slight change to the previous example yields extraordinary results. Consider this:

var a = b = 0;

In this case, only the a variable is declared with var, while the b variable is created as an accidental global. (If you are in the strict mode, you will get an error for this.) With JavaScript, be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

There are three Boolean operators in JavaScript—AND(&), OR(|), and NOT(!).

Before we discuss logical AND and OR operators, we need to understand how they produce a Boolean result. Logical operators are evaluated from left to right and they are tested using the following short-circuit rules:

Now we will explain the three logical Boolean operators:

Additionally, JavaScript supports C-like ternary operators as follows:

var allowedToDrive = (age > 21) ? "yes" : "no";

If (age>21), the expression after ? will be assigned to the allowedToDrive variable and the expression after : is assigned otherwise. This is equivalent to an if-else conditional statement. Let's see another example:

function isAllowedToDrive(age){
  if(age>21){
    return true;
  }else{
    return false;
  }
}
console.log(isAllowedToDrive(22));

In this example, the isAllowedToDrive() function accepts one integer parameter, age. Based on the value of this variable, we return true or false to the calling function. This is a well-known and most familiar if-else conditional logic. Most of the time, if-else keeps the code easier to read. For simpler cases of single conditions, using the ternary operator is also okay, but if you see that you are using the ternary operator for more complicated expressions, try to stick with if-else because it is easier to interpret if-else conditions than a very complex ternary expression.

If-else conditional statements can be nested as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else if (condition2) {
  statement2
} else if (condition3) {
  statement3
}
..
} else {
  statementN
}

Purely as a matter of taste, you can indent the nested else if as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else
    if (condition2) {

Do not use assignments in place of a conditional statement. Most of the time, they are used because of a mistake as follows:

if(a=b) {
  //do something
}

Mostly, this happens by mistake; the intended code was if(a==b), or better, if(a===b). When you make this mistake and replace a conditional statement with an assignment statement, you end up committing a very difficult-to-find bug. However, if you really want to use an assignment statement with an if statement, make sure that you make your intentions very clear.

One way is to put extra parentheses around your assignment statement:

if((a=b)){
  //this is really something you want to do
}

Another way to handle conditional execution is to use switch-case statements. The switch-case construct in JavaScript is similar to that in C or Java. Let's see the following example:

function sayDay(day){
  switch(day){
    case 1: console.log("Sunday");
      break;
    case 2: console.log("Monday");
      break;
    default:
      console.log("We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto");
  }
}

sayDay(1); //Sunday
sayDay(3); //We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto

One problem with this structure is that you have break out of every case; otherwise, the execution will fall through to the next level. If we remove the break statement from the first case statement, the output will be as follows:

>sayDay(1);
Sunday
Monday

As you can see, if we omit the break statement to break the execution immediately after a condition is satisfied, the execution sequence follows to the next level. This can lead to difficult-to-detect problems in your code. However, this is also a popular style of writing conditional logic if you intend to fall through to the next level:

function debug(level,msg){
  switch(level){
    case "INFO": //intentional fall-through
    case "WARN" :  
    case "DEBUG": console.log(level+ ": " + msg);  
      break;
    case "ERROR": console.error(msg);  
  }
}

debug("INFO","Info Message");
debug("DEBUG","Debug Message");
debug("ERROR","Fatal Exception");

In this example, we are intentionally letting the execution fall through to write a concise switch-case. If levels are either INFO, WARN, or DEBUG, we use the switch-case to fall through to a single point of execution. We omit the break statement for this. If you want to follow this pattern of writing switch statements, make sure that you document your usage for better readability.

Switch statements can have a default case to handle any value that cannot be evaluated by any other case.

JavaScript has a while and do-while loop. The while loop lets you iterate a set of expressions till a condition is met. The following first example iterates the statements enclosed within {} till the i<10 expression is true. Remember that if the value of the i counter is already greater than 10, the loop will not execute at all:

var i=0;
while(i<10){
  i=i+1;
  console.log(i);
}

The following loop keeps executing till infinity because the condition is always true—this can lead to disastrous effects. Your program can use up all your memory or something equally unpleasant:

//infinite loop
while(true){
  //keep doing this
}

If you want to make sure that you execute the loop at least once, you can use the do-while loop (sometimes known as a post-condition loop):

var choice;
do {
choice=getChoiceFromUserInput();
} while(!isInputValid(choice));

In this example, we are asking the user for an input till we find a valid input from the user. While the user types invalid input, we keep asking for an input to the user. It is always argued that, logically, every do-while loop can be transformed into a while loop. However, a do-while loop has a very valid use case like the one we just saw where you want the condition to be checked only after there has been one execution of the loop block.

JavaScript has a very powerful loop similar to C or Java—the for loop. The for loop is popular because it allows you to define the control conditions of the loop in a single line.

The following example prints Hello five times:

for (var i=0;i<5;i++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

Within the definition of the loop, you defined the initial value of the loop counter i to be 0, you defined the i<5 exit condition, and finally, you defined the increment factor.

All three expressions in the previous example are optional. You can omit them if required. For example, the following variations are all going to produce the same result as the previous loop:

var x=0;
//Omit initialitzation
for (;x<5;x++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

//Omit exit condition
for (var j=0;;j++){
  //exit condition
  if(j>=5){
    break;  
  }else{
    console.log("Hello");
  }
}
//Omit increment
for (var k=0; k<5;){
  console.log("Hello");
  k++;
}

You can also omit all three of these expressions and write for loops. One interesting idiom used frequently is to use for loops with empty statements. The following loop is used to set all the elements of the array to 100. Notice how there is no body to the for-loop:

var arr = [10, 20, 30];
// Assign all array values to 100
for (i = 0; i < arr.length; arr[i++] = 100);
console.log(arr);

The empty statement here is just the single that we see after the for loop statement. The increment factor also modifies the array content. We will discuss arrays later in the book, but here it's sufficient to see that the array elements are set to the 100 value within the loop definition itself.

JavaScript offers two modes of equality—strict and loose. Essentially, loose equality will perform the type conversion when comparing two values, while strict equality will check the values without any type conversion. A strict equality check is performed by === while a loose equality check is performed by ==.

ECMAScript 6 also offers the Object.is method to do a strict equality check like ===. However, Object.is has a special handling for NaN: -0 and +0. When NaN===NaN and NaN==NaN evaluates to false, Object.is(NaN,NaN) will return true.

var n = 0;
var o = new String("0");
var s = "0";
var b = false;

console.log(n === n); // true - same values for numbers
console.log(o === o); // true - non numbers are compared for their values
console.log(s === s); // true - ditto

console.log(n === o); // false - no implicit type conversion, types are different
console.log(n === s); // false - types are different
console.log(o === s); // false - types are different
console.log(null === undefined); // false
console.log(o === null); // false
console.log(o === undefined); // false

Though whitespace is not important in JavaScript, the correct use of whitespace can make the code easy to read. The following guidelines will help in managing whitespaces in your code:

If, else, for, while, and try always have spaces and braces and span multiple lines. This style encourages readability. Let's see the following code:

//Cramped style (Bad)
if(condition) doSomeTask();

while(condition) i++;

for(var i=0;i<10;i++) iterate();

//Use whitespace for better readability (Good)
//Place 1 space before the leading brace.
if (condition) {
  // statements
}

while ( condition ) {
  // statements
}

for ( var i = 0; i < 100; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

// Better:

var i,
    length = 100;

for ( i = 0; i < length; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

// Or...

var i = 0,
    length = 100;

for ( ; i < length; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

var value;

for ( value in object ) {
  // statements
}


if ( true ) {
  // statements
} else {
  // statements
}

//Set off operators with spaces.
// bad
var x=y+5;

// good
var x = y + 5;

//End files with a single newline character.
// bad
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);

// bad
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);↵
↵

// good
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);↵

Whether you prefer single or double quotes shouldn't matter; there is no difference in how JavaScript parses them. However, for the sake of consistency, never mix quotes in the same project. Pick one style and stick with it.

Whitespace can make it impossible to decipher code diffs and changelists. Many editors allow you to automatically remove extra empty lines and end of lines—you should use these.

Checking the type of a variable can be done as follows:

//String:
typeof variable === "string"
//Number:
typeof variable === "number"
//Boolean:
typeof variable === "boolean"
//Object:
typeof variable === "object"
//null:
variable === null
//null or undefined:
variable == null

Perform type coercion at the beginning of the statement as follows:

// bad
const totalScore = this.reviewScore + '';
// good
const totalScore = String(this.reviewScore);

Use parseInt() for Numbers and always with a radix for the type casting:

const inputValue = '4';
// bad
const val = new Number(inputValue);
// bad
const val = +inputValue;
// bad
const val = inputValue >> 0;
// bad
const val = parseInt(inputValue);
// good
const val = Number(inputValue);
// good
const val = parseInt(inputValue, 10);

The following example shows you how to type cast using Booleans:

const age = 0;  // bad 
const hasAge = new Boolean(age);  // good 
const hasAge = Boolean(age); // good 
const hasAge = !!age;

There are various stylistic guidelines around conditional statements. Let's study the following code:

// When evaluating that array has length,
// WRONG:
if ( array.length > 0 ) ...

// evaluate truthiness(GOOD):
if ( array.length ) ...

// When evaluating that an array is empty,
// (BAD):
if ( array.length === 0 ) ...

// evaluate truthiness(GOOD):
if ( !array.length ) ...

// When checking if string is not empty,
// (BAD):
if ( string !== "" ) ...

// evaluate truthiness (GOOD):
if ( string ) ...

// When checking if a string is empty,
// BAD:
if ( string === "" ) ...

// evaluate falsy-ness (GOOD):
if ( !string ) ...

// When checking if a reference is true,
// BAD:
if ( foo === true ) ...

// GOOD
if ( foo ) ...

// When checking if a reference is false,
// BAD:
if ( foo === false ) ...

// GOOD
if ( !foo ) ...

// this will also match: 0, "", null, undefined, NaN
// If you MUST test for a boolean false, then use
if ( foo === false ) ...

// a reference that might be null or undefined, but NOT false, "" or 0,
// BAD:
if ( foo === null || foo === undefined ) ...

// GOOD
if ( foo == null ) ...

// Don't complicate matters
return x === 0 ? 'sunday' : x === 1 ? 'Monday' : 'Tuesday';

// Better:
if (x === 0) {
    return 'Sunday';
} else if (x === 1) {
    return 'Monday';
} else {
    return 'Tuesday';
}

// Even Better:
switch (x) {
    case 0:
        return 'Sunday';
    case 1:
        return 'Monday';
    default:
        return 'Tuesday';
}

Naming is super important. I am sure that you have encountered code with terse and undecipherable naming. Let's study the following lines of code:

//Avoid single letter names. Be descriptive with your naming.
// bad
function q() {

}

// good
function query() {
}

//Use camelCase when naming objects, functions, and instances.
// bad
const OBJEcT = {};
const this_is_object = {};
function c() {}

// good
const thisIsObject = {};
function thisIsFunction() {}

//Use PascalCase when naming constructors or classes.
// bad
function user(options) {
  this.name = options.name;
}

const bad = new user({
  name: 'nope',
});

// good
class User {
  constructor(options) {
    this.name = options.name;
  }
}

const good = new User({
  name: 'yup',
});

// Use a leading underscore _ when naming private properties.
// bad
this.__firstName__ = 'Panda';
this.firstName_ = 'Panda';

// good
this._firstName = 'Panda';

The eval() method, which takes a String containing JavaScript code, compiles it and runs it, is one of the most misused methods in JavaScript. There are a few situations where you will find yourself using eval(), for example, when you are building an expression based on the user input.

However, most of the time, eval() is used is just because it gets the job done. The eval() method is too hacky and makes the code unpredictable. It's slow, unwieldy, and tends to magnify the damage when you make a mistake. If you are considering using eval(), then there is probably a better way.

The following snippet shows the usage of eval():

console.log(typeof eval(new String("1+1"))); // "object"
console.log(eval(new String("1+1")));        //1+1
console.log(eval("1+1"));                    // 2
console.log(typeof eval("1+1"));             // returns "number"
var expression = new String("1+1");
console.log(eval(expression.toString()));    //2

I will refrain from showing other uses of eval() and make sure that you are discouraged enough to stay away from it.

ECMAScript 5 has a strict mode that results in cleaner JavaScript, with fewer unsafe features, more warnings, and more logical behavior. The normal (non-strict) mode is also called sloppy mode. The strict mode can help you avoid a few sloppy programming practices. If you are starting a new JavaScript project, I would highly recommend that you use the strict mode by default.

You switch on the strict mode by typing the following line first in your JavaScript file or in your <script> element:

'use strict';

Note that JavaScript engines that don't support ECMAScript 5 will simply ignore the preceding statement and continue as non-strict mode.

If you want to switch on the strict mode per function, you can do it as follows:

function foo() {
    'use strict';
    
}

This is handy when you are working with a legacy code base where switching on the strict mode everywhere may break things.

If you are working on an existing legacy code, be careful because using the strict mode can break things. There are caveats on this:

function sloppyFunc() {
  sloppyVar = 123; 
} sloppyFunc();  // creates global variable `sloppyVar`
console.log(sloppyVar);  // 123

function strictFunc() {
  'use strict';
  strictVar = 123;
}
strictFunc();  // ReferenceError: strictVar is not defined

> 010 === 8 true

function f() { 
'use strict'; 
return 010 
} 
//SyntaxError: Octal literals are not allowed in 

JSHint is a program that flags suspicious usage in programs written in JavaScript. The core project consists of a library itself as well as a command line interface (CLI) program distributed as a Node module.

If you have Node.js installed, you can install JSHint using npm as follows:

npm install jshint –g

Once JSHint is installed, you can lint a single or multiple JavaScript files. Save the following JavaScript code snippet in the test.js file:

function f(condition) {
  switch (condition) {
  case 1:
    console.log(1);
  case 2:
    console.log(1);
  }
}

When we run the file using JSHint, it will warn us of a missing break statement in the switch case as follows:

>jshint test.js
test.js: line 4, col 19, Expected a 'break' statement before 'case'.
1 error

JSHint is configurable to suit your needs. Check the documentation at http://jshint.com/docs/ to see how you can customize JSHint according to your project needs. I use JSHint extensively and suggest you start using it. You will be surprised to see how many hidden bugs and stylistic issues you will be able to fix in your code with such a simple tool.

You can run JSHint at the root of your project and lint the entire project. You can place JSHint directives in the .jshintrc file. This file may look something as follows:

{
     "asi": false,
     "expr": true,
     "loopfunc": true,
     "curly": false,
     "evil": true,
     "white": true,
     "undef": true,
     "indent": 4
}

JavaScript allows single line or multiple line comments. The syntax is similar to C or Java:

// a one line comment
 
/* this is a longer, 
   multi-line comment
 */
 
/* You can't /* nest comments */ SyntaxError */

Variables are symbolic names for values. The names of variables, or identifiers, must follow certain rules.

A JavaScript variable name must start with a letter, underscore (_), or dollar sign ($); subsequent characters can also be digits (0-9). As JavaScript is case sensitive, letters include the characters A through Z (uppercase) and the characters a through z (lowercase).

You can use ISO 8859-1 or Unicode letters in variable names.

New variables in JavaScript should be defined with the var keyword. If you declare a variable without assigning a value to it, its type is undefined by default. One terrible thing is that if you don't declare your variable with the var keyword, they become implicit globals. Let me reiterate that implicit globals are a terrible thing—we will discuss this in detail later in the book when we discuss variable scopes and closures, but it's important to remember that you should always declare a variable with the var keyword unless you know what you are doing:

var a;      //declares a variable but its undefined
var b = 0;
console.log(b);    //0
console.log(a);    //undefined
console.log(a+b);  //NaN

The NaN value is a special value that indicates that the entity is not a number.

You can create a read-only named constant with the const keyword. The constant name must start with a letter, underscore, or dollar sign and can contain alphabetic, numeric, or underscore characters:

const area_code = '515';

A constant cannot change the value through assignment or be redeclared, and it has to be initialized to a value.

JavaScript supports the standard variations of types:

The Number type can represent both 32-bit integer and 64-bit floating point values. For example, the following line of code declares a variable to hold an integer value, which is defined by the literal 555:

var aNumber = 555;

To define a floating point value, you need to include a decimal point and one digit after the decimal point:

var aFloat = 555.0;

Essentially, there's no such thing as an integer in JavaScript. JavaScript uses a 64-bit floating point representation, which is the same as Java's double.

Hence, you would see something as follows:

EN-VedA:~$ node
> 0.1+0.2
0.30000000000000004
> (0.1+0.2)===0.3
false

I recommend that you read the exhaustive answer on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588004/is-floating-point-math-broken) and (http://floating-point-gui.de/), which explains why this is the case. However, it is important to understand that floating point arithmetic should be handled with due care. In most cases, you will not have to rely on extreme precision of decimal points but if you have to, you can try using libraries such as big.js (https://github.com/MikeMcl/big.js) that try to solve this problem.

If you intend to code extremely precise financial systems, you should represent $ values as cents to avoid rounding errors. One of the systems that I worked on used to round off the Value Added Tax (VAT) amount to two decimal points. With thousands of orders a day, this rounding off amount per order became a massive accounting headache. We needed to overhaul the entire Java web service stack and JavaScript frontend for this.

A few special values are also defined as part of the Number type. The first two are Number.MAX_VALUE and Number.MIN_VALUE, which define the outer bounds of the Number value set. All ECMAScript numbers must fall between these two values, without exception. A calculation can, however, result in a number that does not fall in between these two numbers. When a calculation results in a number greater than Number.MAX_VALUE, it is assigned a value of Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY, meaning that it has no numeric value anymore. Likewise, a calculation that results in a number less than Number.MIN_VALUE is assigned a value of Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY, which also has no numeric value. If a calculation returns an infinite value, the result cannot be used in any further calculations. You can use the isInfinite() method to verify if the calculation result is an infinity.

Another peculiarity of JavaScript is a special value called NaN (short for Not a Number). In general, this occurs when conversion from another type (String, Boolean, and so on) fails. Observe the following peculiarity of NaN:

EN-VedA:~ $ node
> isNaN(NaN);
true
> NaN==NaN;
false
> isNaN("elephant");
true
> NaN+5;
NaN

The second line is strange—NaN is not equal to NaN. If NaN is part of any mathematical operation, the result also becomes NaN. As a general rule, stay away from using NaN in any expression. For any advanced mathematical operations, you can use the Math global object and its methods:

> Math.E
2.718281828459045
> Math.SQRT2
1.4142135623730951
> Math.abs(-900)
900
> Math.pow(2,3)
8

You can use the parseInt() and parseFloat() methods to convert a string expression to an integer or float:

> parseInt("230",10);
230
> parseInt("010",10);
10
> parseInt("010",8); //octal base
8
> parseInt("010",2); //binary
2
> + "4"
4

With parseInt(), you should provide an explicit base to prevent nasty surprises on older browsers. The last trick is just using a + sign to auto-convert the "42" string to a number, 42. It is also prudent to handle the parseInt() result with isNaN(). Let's see the following example:

var underterminedValue = "elephant";
if (isNaN(parseInt(underterminedValue,2))) 
{
   console.log("handle not a number case");
}
else
{
   console.log("handle number case");
}

In this example, you are not sure of the type of the value that the underterminedValue variable can hold if the value is being set from an external interface. If isNaN() is not handled, parseInt() will cause an exception and the program can crash.

In JavaScript, strings are a sequence of Unicode characters (each character takes 16 bits). Each character in the string can be accessed by its index. The first character index is zero. Strings are enclosed inside " or '—both are valid ways to represent strings. Let's see the following:

> console.log("Hippopotamus chewing gum");
Hippopotamus chewing gum
> console.log('Single quoted hippopotamus');
Single quoted hippopotamus
> console.log("Broken \n lines");
Broken
 lines

The last line shows you how certain character literals when escaped with a backslash \ can be used as special characters. The following is a list of such special characters:

You get default support for special characters and Unicode literals with JavaScript strings:

> '\xA9'
'©'
> '\u00A9'
'©'

One important thing about JavaScript Strings, Numbers, and Booleans is that they actually have wrapper objects around their primitive equivalent. The following example shows the usage of the wrapper objects:

var s = new String("dummy"); //Creates a String object
console.log(s); //"dummy"
console.log(typeof s); //"object"
var nonObject = "1" + "2"; //Create a String primitive 
console.log(typeof nonObject); //"string"
var objString = new String("1" + "2"); //Creates a String object
console.log(typeof objString); //"object"
//Helper functions
console.log("Hello".length); //5
console.log("Hello".charAt(0)); //"H"
console.log("Hello".charAt(1)); //"e"
console.log("Hello".indexOf("e")); //1
console.log("Hello".lastIndexOf("l")); //3
console.log("Hello".startsWith("H")); //true
console.log("Hello".endsWith("o")); //true
console.log("Hello".includes("X")); //false
var splitStringByWords = "Hello World".split(" ");
console.log(splitStringByWords); //["Hello", "World"]
var splitStringByChars = "Hello World".split("");
console.log(splitStringByChars); //["H", "e", "l", "l", "o", " ", "W", "o", "r", "l", "d"]
console.log("lowercasestring".toUpperCase()); //"LOWERCASESTRING"
console.log("UPPPERCASESTRING".toLowerCase()); //"upppercasestring"
console.log("There are no spaces in the end     ".trim()); //"There are no spaces in the end"

JavaScript allows multiline strings also. Strings enclosed within ` (Grave accent—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent) are considered multiline. Let's see the following example:

> console.log(`string text on first line
string text on second line `);
"string text on first line
string text on second line "

This kind of string is also known as a template string and can be used for string interpolation. JavaScript allows Python-like string interpolation using this syntax.

Normally, you would do something similar to the following:

var a=1, b=2;
console.log("Sum of values is :" + (a+b) + " and multiplication is :" + (a*b));

However, with string interpolation, things become a bit clearer:

console.log(`Sum of values is :${a+b} and multiplication is : ${a*b}`);

JavaScript indicates an absence of meaningful values by two special values—null, when the non-value is deliberate, and undefined, when the value is not assigned to the variable yet. Let's see the following example:

> var xl;
> console.log(typeof xl);
undefined
> console.log(null==undefined);
true

JavaScript Boolean primitives are represented by true and false keywords. The following rules govern what becomes false and what turns out to be true:

JavaScript Booleans are tricky primarily because the behavior is radically different in the way you create them.

There are two ways in which you can create Booleans in JavaScript:

Both these methods return expected truthy or falsy values. However, if you create a Boolean object using the new operator, things can go really wrong.

Essentially, when you use the new operator and the Boolean(value) constructor, you don't get a primitive true or false in return, you get an object instead—and unfortunately, JavaScript considers an object as truthy:

var oBooleanTrue = new Boolean(true);
var oBooleanFalse = new Boolean(false);
console.log(oBooleanTrue); //true
console.log(typeof oBooleanTrue); //object
if(oBooleanFalse){
 console.log("I am seriously truthy, don't believe me");
}
>"I am seriously truthy, don't believe me"

if(oBooleanTrue){
 console.log("I am also truthy, see ?");
}
>"I am also truthy, see ?"

//Use valueOf() to extract real value within the Boolean object
if(oBooleanFalse.valueOf()){
 console.log("With valueOf, I am false");  
}else{
 console.log("Without valueOf, I am still truthy");
}
>"Without valueOf, I am still truthy"

So, the smart thing to do is to always avoid Boolean constructors to create a new Boolean object. It breaks the fundamental contract of Boolean logic and you should stay away from such difficult-to-debug buggy code.

One of the problems with using reference types to store values has been the use of the typeof operator, which returns object no matter what type of object is being referenced. To provide a solution, you can use the instanceof operator. Let's see some examples:

var aStringObject = new String("string");
console.log(typeof aStringObject);        //"object"
console.log(aStringObject instanceof String);    //true
var aString = "This is a string";
console.log(aString instanceof String);     //false

The third line returns false. We will discuss why this is the case when we discuss prototype chains.

JavaScript does not have a date data type. Instead, you can use the Date object and its methods to work with dates and times in your applications. A Date object is pretty exhaustive and contains several methods to handle most date- and time-related use cases.

JavaScript treats dates similarly to Java. JavaScript store dates as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00.

You can create a Date object using the following declaration:

var dataObject = new Date([parameters]);

The parameters for the Date object constructors can be as follows:

Here are some examples on how to create and manipulate dates in JavaScript:

var today = new Date();
console.log(today.getDate()); //27
console.log(today.getMonth()); //4
console.log(today.getFullYear()); //2015
console.log(today.getHours()); //23
console.log(today.getMinutes()); //13
console.log(today.getSeconds()); //10
//number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC
console.log(today.getTime()); //1432748611392
console.log(today.getTimezoneOffset()); //-330 Minutes

//Calculating elapsed time
var start = Date.now();
// loop for a long time
for (var i=0;i<100000;i++);
var end = Date.now();
var elapsed = end - start; // elapsed time in milliseconds
console.log(elapsed); //71

For any serious applications that require fine-grained control over date and time objects, we recommend using libraries such as Moment.js (https://github.com/moment/moment), Timezone.js (https://github.com/mde/timezone-js), or date.js (https://github.com/MatthewMueller/date). These libraries simplify a lot of recurrent tasks for you and help you focus on other important things.

The + operator, when used as a unary, does not have any effect on a number. However, when applied to a String, the + operator converts it to numbers as follows:

var a=25;
a=+a;            //No impact on a's value  
console.log(a);  //25

var b="70";
console.log(typeof b); //string
b=+b;           //converts string to number
console.log(b); //70
console.log(typeof b); //number

The + operator is used often by a programmer to quickly convert a numeric representation of a String to a number. However, if the String literal is not something that can be converted to a number, you get slightly unpredictable results as follows:

var c="foo";
c=+c;            //Converts foo to number
console.log(c);  //NaN
console.log(typeof c);  //number

var zero="";
zero=+zero; //empty strings are converted to 0
console.log(zero);
console.log(typeof zero);

We will discuss the effects of the + operator on several other data types later in the text.

The ++ operator is a shorthand version of adding 1 to a value and -- is a shorthand to subtract 1 from a value. Java and C have equivalent operators and most will be familiar with them. How about this?

var a= 1;
var b= a++;
console.log(a); //2
console.log(b); //1

Err, what happened here? Shouldn't the b variable have the value 2? The ++ and -- operators are unary operators that can be used either prefix or postfix. The order in which they are used matters. When ++ is used in the prefix position as ++a, it increments the value before the value is returned from the expression rather than after as with a++. Let's see the following code:

var a= 1;
var b= ++a;
console.log(a);  //2
console.log(b);  //2

Many programmers use the chained assignments to assign a single value to multiple variables as follows:

var a, b, c;
a = b = c = 0;

This is fine because the assignment operator (=) results in the value being assigned. In this case, c=0 is evaluated to 0; this would result in b=0, which also evaluates to 0, and hence, a=0 is evaluated.

However, a slight change to the previous example yields extraordinary results. Consider this:

var a = b = 0;

In this case, only the a variable is declared with var, while the b variable is created as an accidental global. (If you are in the strict mode, you will get an error for this.) With JavaScript, be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

There are three Boolean operators in JavaScript—AND(&), OR(|), and NOT(!).

Before we discuss logical AND and OR operators, we need to understand how they produce a Boolean result. Logical operators are evaluated from left to right and they are tested using the following short-circuit rules:

Now we will explain the three logical Boolean operators:

Additionally, JavaScript supports C-like ternary operators as follows:

var allowedToDrive = (age > 21) ? "yes" : "no";

If (age>21), the expression after ? will be assigned to the allowedToDrive variable and the expression after : is assigned otherwise. This is equivalent to an if-else conditional statement. Let's see another example:

function isAllowedToDrive(age){
  if(age>21){
    return true;
  }else{
    return false;
  }
}
console.log(isAllowedToDrive(22));

In this example, the isAllowedToDrive() function accepts one integer parameter, age. Based on the value of this variable, we return true or false to the calling function. This is a well-known and most familiar if-else conditional logic. Most of the time, if-else keeps the code easier to read. For simpler cases of single conditions, using the ternary operator is also okay, but if you see that you are using the ternary operator for more complicated expressions, try to stick with if-else because it is easier to interpret if-else conditions than a very complex ternary expression.

If-else conditional statements can be nested as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else if (condition2) {
  statement2
} else if (condition3) {
  statement3
}
..
} else {
  statementN
}

Purely as a matter of taste, you can indent the nested else if as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else
    if (condition2) {

Do not use assignments in place of a conditional statement. Most of the time, they are used because of a mistake as follows:

if(a=b) {
  //do something
}

Mostly, this happens by mistake; the intended code was if(a==b), or better, if(a===b). When you make this mistake and replace a conditional statement with an assignment statement, you end up committing a very difficult-to-find bug. However, if you really want to use an assignment statement with an if statement, make sure that you make your intentions very clear.

One way is to put extra parentheses around your assignment statement:

if((a=b)){
  //this is really something you want to do
}

Another way to handle conditional execution is to use switch-case statements. The switch-case construct in JavaScript is similar to that in C or Java. Let's see the following example:

function sayDay(day){
  switch(day){
    case 1: console.log("Sunday");
      break;
    case 2: console.log("Monday");
      break;
    default:
      console.log("We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto");
  }
}

sayDay(1); //Sunday
sayDay(3); //We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto

One problem with this structure is that you have break out of every case; otherwise, the execution will fall through to the next level. If we remove the break statement from the first case statement, the output will be as follows:

>sayDay(1);
Sunday
Monday

As you can see, if we omit the break statement to break the execution immediately after a condition is satisfied, the execution sequence follows to the next level. This can lead to difficult-to-detect problems in your code. However, this is also a popular style of writing conditional logic if you intend to fall through to the next level:

function debug(level,msg){
  switch(level){
    case "INFO": //intentional fall-through
    case "WARN" :  
    case "DEBUG": console.log(level+ ": " + msg);  
      break;
    case "ERROR": console.error(msg);  
  }
}

debug("INFO","Info Message");
debug("DEBUG","Debug Message");
debug("ERROR","Fatal Exception");

In this example, we are intentionally letting the execution fall through to write a concise switch-case. If levels are either INFO, WARN, or DEBUG, we use the switch-case to fall through to a single point of execution. We omit the break statement for this. If you want to follow this pattern of writing switch statements, make sure that you document your usage for better readability.

Switch statements can have a default case to handle any value that cannot be evaluated by any other case.

JavaScript has a while and do-while loop. The while loop lets you iterate a set of expressions till a condition is met. The following first example iterates the statements enclosed within {} till the i<10 expression is true. Remember that if the value of the i counter is already greater than 10, the loop will not execute at all:

var i=0;
while(i<10){
  i=i+1;
  console.log(i);
}

The following loop keeps executing till infinity because the condition is always true—this can lead to disastrous effects. Your program can use up all your memory or something equally unpleasant:

//infinite loop
while(true){
  //keep doing this
}

If you want to make sure that you execute the loop at least once, you can use the do-while loop (sometimes known as a post-condition loop):

var choice;
do {
choice=getChoiceFromUserInput();
} while(!isInputValid(choice));

In this example, we are asking the user for an input till we find a valid input from the user. While the user types invalid input, we keep asking for an input to the user. It is always argued that, logically, every do-while loop can be transformed into a while loop. However, a do-while loop has a very valid use case like the one we just saw where you want the condition to be checked only after there has been one execution of the loop block.

JavaScript has a very powerful loop similar to C or Java—the for loop. The for loop is popular because it allows you to define the control conditions of the loop in a single line.

The following example prints Hello five times:

for (var i=0;i<5;i++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

Within the definition of the loop, you defined the initial value of the loop counter i to be 0, you defined the i<5 exit condition, and finally, you defined the increment factor.

All three expressions in the previous example are optional. You can omit them if required. For example, the following variations are all going to produce the same result as the previous loop:

var x=0;
//Omit initialitzation
for (;x<5;x++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

//Omit exit condition
for (var j=0;;j++){
  //exit condition
  if(j>=5){
    break;  
  }else{
    console.log("Hello");
  }
}
//Omit increment
for (var k=0; k<5;){
  console.log("Hello");
  k++;
}

You can also omit all three of these expressions and write for loops. One interesting idiom used frequently is to use for loops with empty statements. The following loop is used to set all the elements of the array to 100. Notice how there is no body to the for-loop:

var arr = [10, 20, 30];
// Assign all array values to 100
for (i = 0; i < arr.length; arr[i++] = 100);
console.log(arr);

The empty statement here is just the single that we see after the for loop statement. The increment factor also modifies the array content. We will discuss arrays later in the book, but here it's sufficient to see that the array elements are set to the 100 value within the loop definition itself.

JavaScript offers two modes of equality—strict and loose. Essentially, loose equality will perform the type conversion when comparing two values, while strict equality will check the values without any type conversion. A strict equality check is performed by === while a loose equality check is performed by ==.

ECMAScript 6 also offers the Object.is method to do a strict equality check like ===. However, Object.is has a special handling for NaN: -0 and +0. When NaN===NaN and NaN==NaN evaluates to false, Object.is(NaN,NaN) will return true.

var n = 0;
var o = new String("0");
var s = "0";
var b = false;

console.log(n === n); // true - same values for numbers
console.log(o === o); // true - non numbers are compared for their values
console.log(s === s); // true - ditto

console.log(n === o); // false - no implicit type conversion, types are different
console.log(n === s); // false - types are different
console.log(o === s); // false - types are different
console.log(null === undefined); // false
console.log(o === null); // false
console.log(o === undefined); // false

Though whitespace is not important in JavaScript, the correct use of whitespace can make the code easy to read. The following guidelines will help in managing whitespaces in your code:

If, else, for, while, and try always have spaces and braces and span multiple lines. This style encourages readability. Let's see the following code:

//Cramped style (Bad)
if(condition) doSomeTask();

while(condition) i++;

for(var i=0;i<10;i++) iterate();

//Use whitespace for better readability (Good)
//Place 1 space before the leading brace.
if (condition) {
  // statements
}

while ( condition ) {
  // statements
}

for ( var i = 0; i < 100; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

// Better:

var i,
    length = 100;

for ( i = 0; i < length; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

// Or...

var i = 0,
    length = 100;

for ( ; i < length; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

var value;

for ( value in object ) {
  // statements
}


if ( true ) {
  // statements
} else {
  // statements
}

//Set off operators with spaces.
// bad
var x=y+5;

// good
var x = y + 5;

//End files with a single newline character.
// bad
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);

// bad
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);↵
↵

// good
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);↵

Whether you prefer single or double quotes shouldn't matter; there is no difference in how JavaScript parses them. However, for the sake of consistency, never mix quotes in the same project. Pick one style and stick with it.

Whitespace can make it impossible to decipher code diffs and changelists. Many editors allow you to automatically remove extra empty lines and end of lines—you should use these.

Checking the type of a variable can be done as follows:

//String:
typeof variable === "string"
//Number:
typeof variable === "number"
//Boolean:
typeof variable === "boolean"
//Object:
typeof variable === "object"
//null:
variable === null
//null or undefined:
variable == null

Perform type coercion at the beginning of the statement as follows:

// bad
const totalScore = this.reviewScore + '';
// good
const totalScore = String(this.reviewScore);

Use parseInt() for Numbers and always with a radix for the type casting:

const inputValue = '4';
// bad
const val = new Number(inputValue);
// bad
const val = +inputValue;
// bad
const val = inputValue >> 0;
// bad
const val = parseInt(inputValue);
// good
const val = Number(inputValue);
// good
const val = parseInt(inputValue, 10);

The following example shows you how to type cast using Booleans:

const age = 0;  // bad 
const hasAge = new Boolean(age);  // good 
const hasAge = Boolean(age); // good 
const hasAge = !!age;

There are various stylistic guidelines around conditional statements. Let's study the following code:

// When evaluating that array has length,
// WRONG:
if ( array.length > 0 ) ...

// evaluate truthiness(GOOD):
if ( array.length ) ...

// When evaluating that an array is empty,
// (BAD):
if ( array.length === 0 ) ...

// evaluate truthiness(GOOD):
if ( !array.length ) ...

// When checking if string is not empty,
// (BAD):
if ( string !== "" ) ...

// evaluate truthiness (GOOD):
if ( string ) ...

// When checking if a string is empty,
// BAD:
if ( string === "" ) ...

// evaluate falsy-ness (GOOD):
if ( !string ) ...

// When checking if a reference is true,
// BAD:
if ( foo === true ) ...

// GOOD
if ( foo ) ...

// When checking if a reference is false,
// BAD:
if ( foo === false ) ...

// GOOD
if ( !foo ) ...

// this will also match: 0, "", null, undefined, NaN
// If you MUST test for a boolean false, then use
if ( foo === false ) ...

// a reference that might be null or undefined, but NOT false, "" or 0,
// BAD:
if ( foo === null || foo === undefined ) ...

// GOOD
if ( foo == null ) ...

// Don't complicate matters
return x === 0 ? 'sunday' : x === 1 ? 'Monday' : 'Tuesday';

// Better:
if (x === 0) {
    return 'Sunday';
} else if (x === 1) {
    return 'Monday';
} else {
    return 'Tuesday';
}

// Even Better:
switch (x) {
    case 0:
        return 'Sunday';
    case 1:
        return 'Monday';
    default:
        return 'Tuesday';
}

Naming is super important. I am sure that you have encountered code with terse and undecipherable naming. Let's study the following lines of code:

//Avoid single letter names. Be descriptive with your naming.
// bad
function q() {

}

// good
function query() {
}

//Use camelCase when naming objects, functions, and instances.
// bad
const OBJEcT = {};
const this_is_object = {};
function c() {}

// good
const thisIsObject = {};
function thisIsFunction() {}

//Use PascalCase when naming constructors or classes.
// bad
function user(options) {
  this.name = options.name;
}

const bad = new user({
  name: 'nope',
});

// good
class User {
  constructor(options) {
    this.name = options.name;
  }
}

const good = new User({
  name: 'yup',
});

// Use a leading underscore _ when naming private properties.
// bad
this.__firstName__ = 'Panda';
this.firstName_ = 'Panda';

// good
this._firstName = 'Panda';

The eval() method, which takes a String containing JavaScript code, compiles it and runs it, is one of the most misused methods in JavaScript. There are a few situations where you will find yourself using eval(), for example, when you are building an expression based on the user input.

However, most of the time, eval() is used is just because it gets the job done. The eval() method is too hacky and makes the code unpredictable. It's slow, unwieldy, and tends to magnify the damage when you make a mistake. If you are considering using eval(), then there is probably a better way.

The following snippet shows the usage of eval():

console.log(typeof eval(new String("1+1"))); // "object"
console.log(eval(new String("1+1")));        //1+1
console.log(eval("1+1"));                    // 2
console.log(typeof eval("1+1"));             // returns "number"
var expression = new String("1+1");
console.log(eval(expression.toString()));    //2

I will refrain from showing other uses of eval() and make sure that you are discouraged enough to stay away from it.

ECMAScript 5 has a strict mode that results in cleaner JavaScript, with fewer unsafe features, more warnings, and more logical behavior. The normal (non-strict) mode is also called sloppy mode. The strict mode can help you avoid a few sloppy programming practices. If you are starting a new JavaScript project, I would highly recommend that you use the strict mode by default.

You switch on the strict mode by typing the following line first in your JavaScript file or in your <script> element:

'use strict';

Note that JavaScript engines that don't support ECMAScript 5 will simply ignore the preceding statement and continue as non-strict mode.

If you want to switch on the strict mode per function, you can do it as follows:

function foo() {
    'use strict';
    
}

This is handy when you are working with a legacy code base where switching on the strict mode everywhere may break things.

If you are working on an existing legacy code, be careful because using the strict mode can break things. There are caveats on this:

function sloppyFunc() {
  sloppyVar = 123; 
} sloppyFunc();  // creates global variable `sloppyVar`
console.log(sloppyVar);  // 123

function strictFunc() {
  'use strict';
  strictVar = 123;
}
strictFunc();  // ReferenceError: strictVar is not defined

> 010 === 8 true

function f() { 
'use strict'; 
return 010 
} 
//SyntaxError: Octal literals are not allowed in 

JSHint is a program that flags suspicious usage in programs written in JavaScript. The core project consists of a library itself as well as a command line interface (CLI) program distributed as a Node module.

If you have Node.js installed, you can install JSHint using npm as follows:

npm install jshint –g

Once JSHint is installed, you can lint a single or multiple JavaScript files. Save the following JavaScript code snippet in the test.js file:

function f(condition) {
  switch (condition) {
  case 1:
    console.log(1);
  case 2:
    console.log(1);
  }
}

When we run the file using JSHint, it will warn us of a missing break statement in the switch case as follows:

>jshint test.js
test.js: line 4, col 19, Expected a 'break' statement before 'case'.
1 error

JSHint is configurable to suit your needs. Check the documentation at http://jshint.com/docs/ to see how you can customize JSHint according to your project needs. I use JSHint extensively and suggest you start using it. You will be surprised to see how many hidden bugs and stylistic issues you will be able to fix in your code with such a simple tool.

You can run JSHint at the root of your project and lint the entire project. You can place JSHint directives in the .jshintrc file. This file may look something as follows:

{
     "asi": false,
     "expr": true,
     "loopfunc": true,
     "curly": false,
     "evil": true,
     "white": true,
     "undef": true,
     "indent": 4
}

JavaScript allows single line or multiple line comments. The syntax is similar to C or Java:

// a one line comment
 
/* this is a longer, 
   multi-line comment
 */
 
/* You can't /* nest comments */ SyntaxError */

Variables are symbolic names for values. The names of variables, or identifiers, must follow certain rules.

A JavaScript variable name must start with a letter, underscore (_), or dollar sign ($); subsequent characters can also be digits (0-9). As JavaScript is case sensitive, letters include the characters A through Z (uppercase) and the characters a through z (lowercase).

You can use ISO 8859-1 or Unicode letters in variable names.

New variables in JavaScript should be defined with the var keyword. If you declare a variable without assigning a value to it, its type is undefined by default. One terrible thing is that if you don't declare your variable with the var keyword, they become implicit globals. Let me reiterate that implicit globals are a terrible thing—we will discuss this in detail later in the book when we discuss variable scopes and closures, but it's important to remember that you should always declare a variable with the var keyword unless you know what you are doing:

var a;      //declares a variable but its undefined
var b = 0;
console.log(b);    //0
console.log(a);    //undefined
console.log(a+b);  //NaN

The NaN value is a special value that indicates that the entity is not a number.

You can create a read-only named constant with the const keyword. The constant name must start with a letter, underscore, or dollar sign and can contain alphabetic, numeric, or underscore characters:

const area_code = '515';

A constant cannot change the value through assignment or be redeclared, and it has to be initialized to a value.

JavaScript supports the standard variations of types:

The Number type can represent both 32-bit integer and 64-bit floating point values. For example, the following line of code declares a variable to hold an integer value, which is defined by the literal 555:

var aNumber = 555;

To define a floating point value, you need to include a decimal point and one digit after the decimal point:

var aFloat = 555.0;

Essentially, there's no such thing as an integer in JavaScript. JavaScript uses a 64-bit floating point representation, which is the same as Java's double.

Hence, you would see something as follows:

EN-VedA:~$ node
> 0.1+0.2
0.30000000000000004
> (0.1+0.2)===0.3
false

I recommend that you read the exhaustive answer on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588004/is-floating-point-math-broken) and (http://floating-point-gui.de/), which explains why this is the case. However, it is important to understand that floating point arithmetic should be handled with due care. In most cases, you will not have to rely on extreme precision of decimal points but if you have to, you can try using libraries such as big.js (https://github.com/MikeMcl/big.js) that try to solve this problem.

If you intend to code extremely precise financial systems, you should represent $ values as cents to avoid rounding errors. One of the systems that I worked on used to round off the Value Added Tax (VAT) amount to two decimal points. With thousands of orders a day, this rounding off amount per order became a massive accounting headache. We needed to overhaul the entire Java web service stack and JavaScript frontend for this.

A few special values are also defined as part of the Number type. The first two are Number.MAX_VALUE and Number.MIN_VALUE, which define the outer bounds of the Number value set. All ECMAScript numbers must fall between these two values, without exception. A calculation can, however, result in a number that does not fall in between these two numbers. When a calculation results in a number greater than Number.MAX_VALUE, it is assigned a value of Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY, meaning that it has no numeric value anymore. Likewise, a calculation that results in a number less than Number.MIN_VALUE is assigned a value of Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY, which also has no numeric value. If a calculation returns an infinite value, the result cannot be used in any further calculations. You can use the isInfinite() method to verify if the calculation result is an infinity.

Another peculiarity of JavaScript is a special value called NaN (short for Not a Number). In general, this occurs when conversion from another type (String, Boolean, and so on) fails. Observe the following peculiarity of NaN:

EN-VedA:~ $ node
> isNaN(NaN);
true
> NaN==NaN;
false
> isNaN("elephant");
true
> NaN+5;
NaN

The second line is strange—NaN is not equal to NaN. If NaN is part of any mathematical operation, the result also becomes NaN. As a general rule, stay away from using NaN in any expression. For any advanced mathematical operations, you can use the Math global object and its methods:

> Math.E
2.718281828459045
> Math.SQRT2
1.4142135623730951
> Math.abs(-900)
900
> Math.pow(2,3)
8

You can use the parseInt() and parseFloat() methods to convert a string expression to an integer or float:

> parseInt("230",10);
230
> parseInt("010",10);
10
> parseInt("010",8); //octal base
8
> parseInt("010",2); //binary
2
> + "4"
4

With parseInt(), you should provide an explicit base to prevent nasty surprises on older browsers. The last trick is just using a + sign to auto-convert the "42" string to a number, 42. It is also prudent to handle the parseInt() result with isNaN(). Let's see the following example:

var underterminedValue = "elephant";
if (isNaN(parseInt(underterminedValue,2))) 
{
   console.log("handle not a number case");
}
else
{
   console.log("handle number case");
}

In this example, you are not sure of the type of the value that the underterminedValue variable can hold if the value is being set from an external interface. If isNaN() is not handled, parseInt() will cause an exception and the program can crash.

In JavaScript, strings are a sequence of Unicode characters (each character takes 16 bits). Each character in the string can be accessed by its index. The first character index is zero. Strings are enclosed inside " or '—both are valid ways to represent strings. Let's see the following:

> console.log("Hippopotamus chewing gum");
Hippopotamus chewing gum
> console.log('Single quoted hippopotamus');
Single quoted hippopotamus
> console.log("Broken \n lines");
Broken
 lines

The last line shows you how certain character literals when escaped with a backslash \ can be used as special characters. The following is a list of such special characters:

You get default support for special characters and Unicode literals with JavaScript strings:

> '\xA9'
'©'
> '\u00A9'
'©'

One important thing about JavaScript Strings, Numbers, and Booleans is that they actually have wrapper objects around their primitive equivalent. The following example shows the usage of the wrapper objects:

var s = new String("dummy"); //Creates a String object
console.log(s); //"dummy"
console.log(typeof s); //"object"
var nonObject = "1" + "2"; //Create a String primitive 
console.log(typeof nonObject); //"string"
var objString = new String("1" + "2"); //Creates a String object
console.log(typeof objString); //"object"
//Helper functions
console.log("Hello".length); //5
console.log("Hello".charAt(0)); //"H"
console.log("Hello".charAt(1)); //"e"
console.log("Hello".indexOf("e")); //1
console.log("Hello".lastIndexOf("l")); //3
console.log("Hello".startsWith("H")); //true
console.log("Hello".endsWith("o")); //true
console.log("Hello".includes("X")); //false
var splitStringByWords = "Hello World".split(" ");
console.log(splitStringByWords); //["Hello", "World"]
var splitStringByChars = "Hello World".split("");
console.log(splitStringByChars); //["H", "e", "l", "l", "o", " ", "W", "o", "r", "l", "d"]
console.log("lowercasestring".toUpperCase()); //"LOWERCASESTRING"
console.log("UPPPERCASESTRING".toLowerCase()); //"upppercasestring"
console.log("There are no spaces in the end     ".trim()); //"There are no spaces in the end"

JavaScript allows multiline strings also. Strings enclosed within ` (Grave accent—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent) are considered multiline. Let's see the following example:

> console.log(`string text on first line
string text on second line `);
"string text on first line
string text on second line "

This kind of string is also known as a template string and can be used for string interpolation. JavaScript allows Python-like string interpolation using this syntax.

Normally, you would do something similar to the following:

var a=1, b=2;
console.log("Sum of values is :" + (a+b) + " and multiplication is :" + (a*b));

However, with string interpolation, things become a bit clearer:

console.log(`Sum of values is :${a+b} and multiplication is : ${a*b}`);

JavaScript indicates an absence of meaningful values by two special values—null, when the non-value is deliberate, and undefined, when the value is not assigned to the variable yet. Let's see the following example:

> var xl;
> console.log(typeof xl);
undefined
> console.log(null==undefined);
true

JavaScript Boolean primitives are represented by true and false keywords. The following rules govern what becomes false and what turns out to be true:

JavaScript Booleans are tricky primarily because the behavior is radically different in the way you create them.

There are two ways in which you can create Booleans in JavaScript:

Both these methods return expected truthy or falsy values. However, if you create a Boolean object using the new operator, things can go really wrong.

Essentially, when you use the new operator and the Boolean(value) constructor, you don't get a primitive true or false in return, you get an object instead—and unfortunately, JavaScript considers an object as truthy:

var oBooleanTrue = new Boolean(true);
var oBooleanFalse = new Boolean(false);
console.log(oBooleanTrue); //true
console.log(typeof oBooleanTrue); //object
if(oBooleanFalse){
 console.log("I am seriously truthy, don't believe me");
}
>"I am seriously truthy, don't believe me"

if(oBooleanTrue){
 console.log("I am also truthy, see ?");
}
>"I am also truthy, see ?"

//Use valueOf() to extract real value within the Boolean object
if(oBooleanFalse.valueOf()){
 console.log("With valueOf, I am false");  
}else{
 console.log("Without valueOf, I am still truthy");
}
>"Without valueOf, I am still truthy"

So, the smart thing to do is to always avoid Boolean constructors to create a new Boolean object. It breaks the fundamental contract of Boolean logic and you should stay away from such difficult-to-debug buggy code.

One of the problems with using reference types to store values has been the use of the typeof operator, which returns object no matter what type of object is being referenced. To provide a solution, you can use the instanceof operator. Let's see some examples:

var aStringObject = new String("string");
console.log(typeof aStringObject);        //"object"
console.log(aStringObject instanceof String);    //true
var aString = "This is a string";
console.log(aString instanceof String);     //false

The third line returns false. We will discuss why this is the case when we discuss prototype chains.

JavaScript does not have a date data type. Instead, you can use the Date object and its methods to work with dates and times in your applications. A Date object is pretty exhaustive and contains several methods to handle most date- and time-related use cases.

JavaScript treats dates similarly to Java. JavaScript store dates as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00.

You can create a Date object using the following declaration:

var dataObject = new Date([parameters]);

The parameters for the Date object constructors can be as follows:

Here are some examples on how to create and manipulate dates in JavaScript:

var today = new Date();
console.log(today.getDate()); //27
console.log(today.getMonth()); //4
console.log(today.getFullYear()); //2015
console.log(today.getHours()); //23
console.log(today.getMinutes()); //13
console.log(today.getSeconds()); //10
//number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC
console.log(today.getTime()); //1432748611392
console.log(today.getTimezoneOffset()); //-330 Minutes

//Calculating elapsed time
var start = Date.now();
// loop for a long time
for (var i=0;i<100000;i++);
var end = Date.now();
var elapsed = end - start; // elapsed time in milliseconds
console.log(elapsed); //71

For any serious applications that require fine-grained control over date and time objects, we recommend using libraries such as Moment.js (https://github.com/moment/moment), Timezone.js (https://github.com/mde/timezone-js), or date.js (https://github.com/MatthewMueller/date). These libraries simplify a lot of recurrent tasks for you and help you focus on other important things.

The + operator, when used as a unary, does not have any effect on a number. However, when applied to a String, the + operator converts it to numbers as follows:

var a=25;
a=+a;            //No impact on a's value  
console.log(a);  //25

var b="70";
console.log(typeof b); //string
b=+b;           //converts string to number
console.log(b); //70
console.log(typeof b); //number

The + operator is used often by a programmer to quickly convert a numeric representation of a String to a number. However, if the String literal is not something that can be converted to a number, you get slightly unpredictable results as follows:

var c="foo";
c=+c;            //Converts foo to number
console.log(c);  //NaN
console.log(typeof c);  //number

var zero="";
zero=+zero; //empty strings are converted to 0
console.log(zero);
console.log(typeof zero);

We will discuss the effects of the + operator on several other data types later in the text.

The ++ operator is a shorthand version of adding 1 to a value and -- is a shorthand to subtract 1 from a value. Java and C have equivalent operators and most will be familiar with them. How about this?

var a= 1;
var b= a++;
console.log(a); //2
console.log(b); //1

Err, what happened here? Shouldn't the b variable have the value 2? The ++ and -- operators are unary operators that can be used either prefix or postfix. The order in which they are used matters. When ++ is used in the prefix position as ++a, it increments the value before the value is returned from the expression rather than after as with a++. Let's see the following code:

var a= 1;
var b= ++a;
console.log(a);  //2
console.log(b);  //2

Many programmers use the chained assignments to assign a single value to multiple variables as follows:

var a, b, c;
a = b = c = 0;

This is fine because the assignment operator (=) results in the value being assigned. In this case, c=0 is evaluated to 0; this would result in b=0, which also evaluates to 0, and hence, a=0 is evaluated.

However, a slight change to the previous example yields extraordinary results. Consider this:

var a = b = 0;

In this case, only the a variable is declared with var, while the b variable is created as an accidental global. (If you are in the strict mode, you will get an error for this.) With JavaScript, be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

There are three Boolean operators in JavaScript—AND(&), OR(|), and NOT(!).

Before we discuss logical AND and OR operators, we need to understand how they produce a Boolean result. Logical operators are evaluated from left to right and they are tested using the following short-circuit rules:

Now we will explain the three logical Boolean operators:

Additionally, JavaScript supports C-like ternary operators as follows:

var allowedToDrive = (age > 21) ? "yes" : "no";

If (age>21), the expression after ? will be assigned to the allowedToDrive variable and the expression after : is assigned otherwise. This is equivalent to an if-else conditional statement. Let's see another example:

function isAllowedToDrive(age){
  if(age>21){
    return true;
  }else{
    return false;
  }
}
console.log(isAllowedToDrive(22));

In this example, the isAllowedToDrive() function accepts one integer parameter, age. Based on the value of this variable, we return true or false to the calling function. This is a well-known and most familiar if-else conditional logic. Most of the time, if-else keeps the code easier to read. For simpler cases of single conditions, using the ternary operator is also okay, but if you see that you are using the ternary operator for more complicated expressions, try to stick with if-else because it is easier to interpret if-else conditions than a very complex ternary expression.

If-else conditional statements can be nested as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else if (condition2) {
  statement2
} else if (condition3) {
  statement3
}
..
} else {
  statementN
}

Purely as a matter of taste, you can indent the nested else if as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else
    if (condition2) {

Do not use assignments in place of a conditional statement. Most of the time, they are used because of a mistake as follows:

if(a=b) {
  //do something
}

Mostly, this happens by mistake; the intended code was if(a==b), or better, if(a===b). When you make this mistake and replace a conditional statement with an assignment statement, you end up committing a very difficult-to-find bug. However, if you really want to use an assignment statement with an if statement, make sure that you make your intentions very clear.

One way is to put extra parentheses around your assignment statement:

if((a=b)){
  //this is really something you want to do
}

Another way to handle conditional execution is to use switch-case statements. The switch-case construct in JavaScript is similar to that in C or Java. Let's see the following example:

function sayDay(day){
  switch(day){
    case 1: console.log("Sunday");
      break;
    case 2: console.log("Monday");
      break;
    default:
      console.log("We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto");
  }
}

sayDay(1); //Sunday
sayDay(3); //We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto

One problem with this structure is that you have break out of every case; otherwise, the execution will fall through to the next level. If we remove the break statement from the first case statement, the output will be as follows:

>sayDay(1);
Sunday
Monday

As you can see, if we omit the break statement to break the execution immediately after a condition is satisfied, the execution sequence follows to the next level. This can lead to difficult-to-detect problems in your code. However, this is also a popular style of writing conditional logic if you intend to fall through to the next level:

function debug(level,msg){
  switch(level){
    case "INFO": //intentional fall-through
    case "WARN" :  
    case "DEBUG": console.log(level+ ": " + msg);  
      break;
    case "ERROR": console.error(msg);  
  }
}

debug("INFO","Info Message");
debug("DEBUG","Debug Message");
debug("ERROR","Fatal Exception");

In this example, we are intentionally letting the execution fall through to write a concise switch-case. If levels are either INFO, WARN, or DEBUG, we use the switch-case to fall through to a single point of execution. We omit the break statement for this. If you want to follow this pattern of writing switch statements, make sure that you document your usage for better readability.

Switch statements can have a default case to handle any value that cannot be evaluated by any other case.

JavaScript has a while and do-while loop. The while loop lets you iterate a set of expressions till a condition is met. The following first example iterates the statements enclosed within {} till the i<10 expression is true. Remember that if the value of the i counter is already greater than 10, the loop will not execute at all:

var i=0;
while(i<10){
  i=i+1;
  console.log(i);
}

The following loop keeps executing till infinity because the condition is always true—this can lead to disastrous effects. Your program can use up all your memory or something equally unpleasant:

//infinite loop
while(true){
  //keep doing this
}

If you want to make sure that you execute the loop at least once, you can use the do-while loop (sometimes known as a post-condition loop):

var choice;
do {
choice=getChoiceFromUserInput();
} while(!isInputValid(choice));

In this example, we are asking the user for an input till we find a valid input from the user. While the user types invalid input, we keep asking for an input to the user. It is always argued that, logically, every do-while loop can be transformed into a while loop. However, a do-while loop has a very valid use case like the one we just saw where you want the condition to be checked only after there has been one execution of the loop block.

JavaScript has a very powerful loop similar to C or Java—the for loop. The for loop is popular because it allows you to define the control conditions of the loop in a single line.

The following example prints Hello five times:

for (var i=0;i<5;i++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

Within the definition of the loop, you defined the initial value of the loop counter i to be 0, you defined the i<5 exit condition, and finally, you defined the increment factor.

All three expressions in the previous example are optional. You can omit them if required. For example, the following variations are all going to produce the same result as the previous loop:

var x=0;
//Omit initialitzation
for (;x<5;x++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

//Omit exit condition
for (var j=0;;j++){
  //exit condition
  if(j>=5){
    break;  
  }else{
    console.log("Hello");
  }
}
//Omit increment
for (var k=0; k<5;){
  console.log("Hello");
  k++;
}

You can also omit all three of these expressions and write for loops. One interesting idiom used frequently is to use for loops with empty statements. The following loop is used to set all the elements of the array to 100. Notice how there is no body to the for-loop:

var arr = [10, 20, 30];
// Assign all array values to 100
for (i = 0; i < arr.length; arr[i++] = 100);
console.log(arr);

The empty statement here is just the single that we see after the for loop statement. The increment factor also modifies the array content. We will discuss arrays later in the book, but here it's sufficient to see that the array elements are set to the 100 value within the loop definition itself.

JavaScript offers two modes of equality—strict and loose. Essentially, loose equality will perform the type conversion when comparing two values, while strict equality will check the values without any type conversion. A strict equality check is performed by === while a loose equality check is performed by ==.

ECMAScript 6 also offers the Object.is method to do a strict equality check like ===. However, Object.is has a special handling for NaN: -0 and +0. When NaN===NaN and NaN==NaN evaluates to false, Object.is(NaN,NaN) will return true.

var n = 0;
var o = new String("0");
var s = "0";
var b = false;

console.log(n === n); // true - same values for numbers
console.log(o === o); // true - non numbers are compared for their values
console.log(s === s); // true - ditto

console.log(n === o); // false - no implicit type conversion, types are different
console.log(n === s); // false - types are different
console.log(o === s); // false - types are different
console.log(null === undefined); // false
console.log(o === null); // false
console.log(o === undefined); // false

Though whitespace is not important in JavaScript, the correct use of whitespace can make the code easy to read. The following guidelines will help in managing whitespaces in your code:

If, else, for, while, and try always have spaces and braces and span multiple lines. This style encourages readability. Let's see the following code:

//Cramped style (Bad)
if(condition) doSomeTask();

while(condition) i++;

for(var i=0;i<10;i++) iterate();

//Use whitespace for better readability (Good)
//Place 1 space before the leading brace.
if (condition) {
  // statements
}

while ( condition ) {
  // statements
}

for ( var i = 0; i < 100; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

// Better:

var i,
    length = 100;

for ( i = 0; i < length; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

// Or...

var i = 0,
    length = 100;

for ( ; i < length; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

var value;

for ( value in object ) {
  // statements
}


if ( true ) {
  // statements
} else {
  // statements
}

//Set off operators with spaces.
// bad
var x=y+5;

// good
var x = y + 5;

//End files with a single newline character.
// bad
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);

// bad
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);↵
↵

// good
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);↵

Whether you prefer single or double quotes shouldn't matter; there is no difference in how JavaScript parses them. However, for the sake of consistency, never mix quotes in the same project. Pick one style and stick with it.

Whitespace can make it impossible to decipher code diffs and changelists. Many editors allow you to automatically remove extra empty lines and end of lines—you should use these.

Checking the type of a variable can be done as follows:

//String:
typeof variable === "string"
//Number:
typeof variable === "number"
//Boolean:
typeof variable === "boolean"
//Object:
typeof variable === "object"
//null:
variable === null
//null or undefined:
variable == null

Perform type coercion at the beginning of the statement as follows:

// bad
const totalScore = this.reviewScore + '';
// good
const totalScore = String(this.reviewScore);

Use parseInt() for Numbers and always with a radix for the type casting:

const inputValue = '4';
// bad
const val = new Number(inputValue);
// bad
const val = +inputValue;
// bad
const val = inputValue >> 0;
// bad
const val = parseInt(inputValue);
// good
const val = Number(inputValue);
// good
const val = parseInt(inputValue, 10);

The following example shows you how to type cast using Booleans:

const age = 0;  // bad 
const hasAge = new Boolean(age);  // good 
const hasAge = Boolean(age); // good 
const hasAge = !!age;

There are various stylistic guidelines around conditional statements. Let's study the following code:

// When evaluating that array has length,
// WRONG:
if ( array.length > 0 ) ...

// evaluate truthiness(GOOD):
if ( array.length ) ...

// When evaluating that an array is empty,
// (BAD):
if ( array.length === 0 ) ...

// evaluate truthiness(GOOD):
if ( !array.length ) ...

// When checking if string is not empty,
// (BAD):
if ( string !== "" ) ...

// evaluate truthiness (GOOD):
if ( string ) ...

// When checking if a string is empty,
// BAD:
if ( string === "" ) ...

// evaluate falsy-ness (GOOD):
if ( !string ) ...

// When checking if a reference is true,
// BAD:
if ( foo === true ) ...

// GOOD
if ( foo ) ...

// When checking if a reference is false,
// BAD:
if ( foo === false ) ...

// GOOD
if ( !foo ) ...

// this will also match: 0, "", null, undefined, NaN
// If you MUST test for a boolean false, then use
if ( foo === false ) ...

// a reference that might be null or undefined, but NOT false, "" or 0,
// BAD:
if ( foo === null || foo === undefined ) ...

// GOOD
if ( foo == null ) ...

// Don't complicate matters
return x === 0 ? 'sunday' : x === 1 ? 'Monday' : 'Tuesday';

// Better:
if (x === 0) {
    return 'Sunday';
} else if (x === 1) {
    return 'Monday';
} else {
    return 'Tuesday';
}

// Even Better:
switch (x) {
    case 0:
        return 'Sunday';
    case 1:
        return 'Monday';
    default:
        return 'Tuesday';
}

Naming is super important. I am sure that you have encountered code with terse and undecipherable naming. Let's study the following lines of code:

//Avoid single letter names. Be descriptive with your naming.
// bad
function q() {

}

// good
function query() {
}

//Use camelCase when naming objects, functions, and instances.
// bad
const OBJEcT = {};
const this_is_object = {};
function c() {}

// good
const thisIsObject = {};
function thisIsFunction() {}

//Use PascalCase when naming constructors or classes.
// bad
function user(options) {
  this.name = options.name;
}

const bad = new user({
  name: 'nope',
});

// good
class User {
  constructor(options) {
    this.name = options.name;
  }
}

const good = new User({
  name: 'yup',
});

// Use a leading underscore _ when naming private properties.
// bad
this.__firstName__ = 'Panda';
this.firstName_ = 'Panda';

// good
this._firstName = 'Panda';

The eval() method, which takes a String containing JavaScript code, compiles it and runs it, is one of the most misused methods in JavaScript. There are a few situations where you will find yourself using eval(), for example, when you are building an expression based on the user input.

However, most of the time, eval() is used is just because it gets the job done. The eval() method is too hacky and makes the code unpredictable. It's slow, unwieldy, and tends to magnify the damage when you make a mistake. If you are considering using eval(), then there is probably a better way.

The following snippet shows the usage of eval():

console.log(typeof eval(new String("1+1"))); // "object"
console.log(eval(new String("1+1")));        //1+1
console.log(eval("1+1"));                    // 2
console.log(typeof eval("1+1"));             // returns "number"
var expression = new String("1+1");
console.log(eval(expression.toString()));    //2

I will refrain from showing other uses of eval() and make sure that you are discouraged enough to stay away from it.

ECMAScript 5 has a strict mode that results in cleaner JavaScript, with fewer unsafe features, more warnings, and more logical behavior. The normal (non-strict) mode is also called sloppy mode. The strict mode can help you avoid a few sloppy programming practices. If you are starting a new JavaScript project, I would highly recommend that you use the strict mode by default.

You switch on the strict mode by typing the following line first in your JavaScript file or in your <script> element:

'use strict';

Note that JavaScript engines that don't support ECMAScript 5 will simply ignore the preceding statement and continue as non-strict mode.

If you want to switch on the strict mode per function, you can do it as follows:

function foo() {
    'use strict';
    
}

This is handy when you are working with a legacy code base where switching on the strict mode everywhere may break things.

If you are working on an existing legacy code, be careful because using the strict mode can break things. There are caveats on this:

function sloppyFunc() {
  sloppyVar = 123; 
} sloppyFunc();  // creates global variable `sloppyVar`
console.log(sloppyVar);  // 123

function strictFunc() {
  'use strict';
  strictVar = 123;
}
strictFunc();  // ReferenceError: strictVar is not defined

> 010 === 8 true

function f() { 
'use strict'; 
return 010 
} 
//SyntaxError: Octal literals are not allowed in 

JSHint is a program that flags suspicious usage in programs written in JavaScript. The core project consists of a library itself as well as a command line interface (CLI) program distributed as a Node module.

If you have Node.js installed, you can install JSHint using npm as follows:

npm install jshint –g

Once JSHint is installed, you can lint a single or multiple JavaScript files. Save the following JavaScript code snippet in the test.js file:

function f(condition) {
  switch (condition) {
  case 1:
    console.log(1);
  case 2:
    console.log(1);
  }
}

When we run the file using JSHint, it will warn us of a missing break statement in the switch case as follows:

>jshint test.js
test.js: line 4, col 19, Expected a 'break' statement before 'case'.
1 error

JSHint is configurable to suit your needs. Check the documentation at http://jshint.com/docs/ to see how you can customize JSHint according to your project needs. I use JSHint extensively and suggest you start using it. You will be surprised to see how many hidden bugs and stylistic issues you will be able to fix in your code with such a simple tool.

You can run JSHint at the root of your project and lint the entire project. You can place JSHint directives in the .jshintrc file. This file may look something as follows:

{
     "asi": false,
     "expr": true,
     "loopfunc": true,
     "curly": false,
     "evil": true,
     "white": true,
     "undef": true,
     "indent": 4
}

Variables are symbolic names for values. The names of variables, or identifiers, must follow certain rules.

A JavaScript variable name must start with a letter, underscore (_), or dollar sign ($); subsequent characters can also be digits (0-9). As JavaScript is case sensitive, letters include the characters A through Z (uppercase) and the characters a through z (lowercase).

You can use ISO 8859-1 or Unicode letters in variable names.

New variables in JavaScript should be defined with the var keyword. If you declare a variable without assigning a value to it, its type is undefined by default. One terrible thing is that if you don't declare your variable with the var keyword, they become implicit globals. Let me reiterate that implicit globals are a terrible thing—we will discuss this in detail later in the book when we discuss variable scopes and closures, but it's important to remember that you should always declare a variable with the var keyword unless you know what you are doing:

var a;      //declares a variable but its undefined
var b = 0;
console.log(b);    //0
console.log(a);    //undefined
console.log(a+b);  //NaN

The NaN value is a special value that indicates that the entity is not a number.

You can create a read-only named constant with the const keyword. The constant name must start with a letter, underscore, or dollar sign and can contain alphabetic, numeric, or underscore characters:

const area_code = '515';

A constant cannot change the value through assignment or be redeclared, and it has to be initialized to a value.

JavaScript supports the standard variations of types:

The Number type can represent both 32-bit integer and 64-bit floating point values. For example, the following line of code declares a variable to hold an integer value, which is defined by the literal 555:

var aNumber = 555;

To define a floating point value, you need to include a decimal point and one digit after the decimal point:

var aFloat = 555.0;

Essentially, there's no such thing as an integer in JavaScript. JavaScript uses a 64-bit floating point representation, which is the same as Java's double.

Hence, you would see something as follows:

EN-VedA:~$ node
> 0.1+0.2
0.30000000000000004
> (0.1+0.2)===0.3
false

I recommend that you read the exhaustive answer on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588004/is-floating-point-math-broken) and (http://floating-point-gui.de/), which explains why this is the case. However, it is important to understand that floating point arithmetic should be handled with due care. In most cases, you will not have to rely on extreme precision of decimal points but if you have to, you can try using libraries such as big.js (https://github.com/MikeMcl/big.js) that try to solve this problem.

If you intend to code extremely precise financial systems, you should represent $ values as cents to avoid rounding errors. One of the systems that I worked on used to round off the Value Added Tax (VAT) amount to two decimal points. With thousands of orders a day, this rounding off amount per order became a massive accounting headache. We needed to overhaul the entire Java web service stack and JavaScript frontend for this.

A few special values are also defined as part of the Number type. The first two are Number.MAX_VALUE and Number.MIN_VALUE, which define the outer bounds of the Number value set. All ECMAScript numbers must fall between these two values, without exception. A calculation can, however, result in a number that does not fall in between these two numbers. When a calculation results in a number greater than Number.MAX_VALUE, it is assigned a value of Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY, meaning that it has no numeric value anymore. Likewise, a calculation that results in a number less than Number.MIN_VALUE is assigned a value of Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY, which also has no numeric value. If a calculation returns an infinite value, the result cannot be used in any further calculations. You can use the isInfinite() method to verify if the calculation result is an infinity.

Another peculiarity of JavaScript is a special value called NaN (short for Not a Number). In general, this occurs when conversion from another type (String, Boolean, and so on) fails. Observe the following peculiarity of NaN:

EN-VedA:~ $ node
> isNaN(NaN);
true
> NaN==NaN;
false
> isNaN("elephant");
true
> NaN+5;
NaN

The second line is strange—NaN is not equal to NaN. If NaN is part of any mathematical operation, the result also becomes NaN. As a general rule, stay away from using NaN in any expression. For any advanced mathematical operations, you can use the Math global object and its methods:

> Math.E
2.718281828459045
> Math.SQRT2
1.4142135623730951
> Math.abs(-900)
900
> Math.pow(2,3)
8

You can use the parseInt() and parseFloat() methods to convert a string expression to an integer or float:

> parseInt("230",10);
230
> parseInt("010",10);
10
> parseInt("010",8); //octal base
8
> parseInt("010",2); //binary
2
> + "4"
4

With parseInt(), you should provide an explicit base to prevent nasty surprises on older browsers. The last trick is just using a + sign to auto-convert the "42" string to a number, 42. It is also prudent to handle the parseInt() result with isNaN(). Let's see the following example:

var underterminedValue = "elephant";
if (isNaN(parseInt(underterminedValue,2))) 
{
   console.log("handle not a number case");
}
else
{
   console.log("handle number case");
}

In this example, you are not sure of the type of the value that the underterminedValue variable can hold if the value is being set from an external interface. If isNaN() is not handled, parseInt() will cause an exception and the program can crash.

In JavaScript, strings are a sequence of Unicode characters (each character takes 16 bits). Each character in the string can be accessed by its index. The first character index is zero. Strings are enclosed inside " or '—both are valid ways to represent strings. Let's see the following:

> console.log("Hippopotamus chewing gum");
Hippopotamus chewing gum
> console.log('Single quoted hippopotamus');
Single quoted hippopotamus
> console.log("Broken \n lines");
Broken
 lines

The last line shows you how certain character literals when escaped with a backslash \ can be used as special characters. The following is a list of such special characters:

You get default support for special characters and Unicode literals with JavaScript strings:

> '\xA9'
'©'
> '\u00A9'
'©'

One important thing about JavaScript Strings, Numbers, and Booleans is that they actually have wrapper objects around their primitive equivalent. The following example shows the usage of the wrapper objects:

var s = new String("dummy"); //Creates a String object
console.log(s); //"dummy"
console.log(typeof s); //"object"
var nonObject = "1" + "2"; //Create a String primitive 
console.log(typeof nonObject); //"string"
var objString = new String("1" + "2"); //Creates a String object
console.log(typeof objString); //"object"
//Helper functions
console.log("Hello".length); //5
console.log("Hello".charAt(0)); //"H"
console.log("Hello".charAt(1)); //"e"
console.log("Hello".indexOf("e")); //1
console.log("Hello".lastIndexOf("l")); //3
console.log("Hello".startsWith("H")); //true
console.log("Hello".endsWith("o")); //true
console.log("Hello".includes("X")); //false
var splitStringByWords = "Hello World".split(" ");
console.log(splitStringByWords); //["Hello", "World"]
var splitStringByChars = "Hello World".split("");
console.log(splitStringByChars); //["H", "e", "l", "l", "o", " ", "W", "o", "r", "l", "d"]
console.log("lowercasestring".toUpperCase()); //"LOWERCASESTRING"
console.log("UPPPERCASESTRING".toLowerCase()); //"upppercasestring"
console.log("There are no spaces in the end     ".trim()); //"There are no spaces in the end"

JavaScript allows multiline strings also. Strings enclosed within ` (Grave accent—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent) are considered multiline. Let's see the following example:

> console.log(`string text on first line
string text on second line `);
"string text on first line
string text on second line "

This kind of string is also known as a template string and can be used for string interpolation. JavaScript allows Python-like string interpolation using this syntax.

Normally, you would do something similar to the following:

var a=1, b=2;
console.log("Sum of values is :" + (a+b) + " and multiplication is :" + (a*b));

However, with string interpolation, things become a bit clearer:

console.log(`Sum of values is :${a+b} and multiplication is : ${a*b}`);

JavaScript indicates an absence of meaningful values by two special values—null, when the non-value is deliberate, and undefined, when the value is not assigned to the variable yet. Let's see the following example:

> var xl;
> console.log(typeof xl);
undefined
> console.log(null==undefined);
true

JavaScript Boolean primitives are represented by true and false keywords. The following rules govern what becomes false and what turns out to be true:

JavaScript Booleans are tricky primarily because the behavior is radically different in the way you create them.

There are two ways in which you can create Booleans in JavaScript:

Both these methods return expected truthy or falsy values. However, if you create a Boolean object using the new operator, things can go really wrong.

Essentially, when you use the new operator and the Boolean(value) constructor, you don't get a primitive true or false in return, you get an object instead—and unfortunately, JavaScript considers an object as truthy:

var oBooleanTrue = new Boolean(true);
var oBooleanFalse = new Boolean(false);
console.log(oBooleanTrue); //true
console.log(typeof oBooleanTrue); //object
if(oBooleanFalse){
 console.log("I am seriously truthy, don't believe me");
}
>"I am seriously truthy, don't believe me"

if(oBooleanTrue){
 console.log("I am also truthy, see ?");
}
>"I am also truthy, see ?"

//Use valueOf() to extract real value within the Boolean object
if(oBooleanFalse.valueOf()){
 console.log("With valueOf, I am false");  
}else{
 console.log("Without valueOf, I am still truthy");
}
>"Without valueOf, I am still truthy"

So, the smart thing to do is to always avoid Boolean constructors to create a new Boolean object. It breaks the fundamental contract of Boolean logic and you should stay away from such difficult-to-debug buggy code.

One of the problems with using reference types to store values has been the use of the typeof operator, which returns object no matter what type of object is being referenced. To provide a solution, you can use the instanceof operator. Let's see some examples:

var aStringObject = new String("string");
console.log(typeof aStringObject);        //"object"
console.log(aStringObject instanceof String);    //true
var aString = "This is a string";
console.log(aString instanceof String);     //false

The third line returns false. We will discuss why this is the case when we discuss prototype chains.

JavaScript does not have a date data type. Instead, you can use the Date object and its methods to work with dates and times in your applications. A Date object is pretty exhaustive and contains several methods to handle most date- and time-related use cases.

JavaScript treats dates similarly to Java. JavaScript store dates as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00.

You can create a Date object using the following declaration:

var dataObject = new Date([parameters]);

The parameters for the Date object constructors can be as follows:

Here are some examples on how to create and manipulate dates in JavaScript:

var today = new Date();
console.log(today.getDate()); //27
console.log(today.getMonth()); //4
console.log(today.getFullYear()); //2015
console.log(today.getHours()); //23
console.log(today.getMinutes()); //13
console.log(today.getSeconds()); //10
//number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC
console.log(today.getTime()); //1432748611392
console.log(today.getTimezoneOffset()); //-330 Minutes

//Calculating elapsed time
var start = Date.now();
// loop for a long time
for (var i=0;i<100000;i++);
var end = Date.now();
var elapsed = end - start; // elapsed time in milliseconds
console.log(elapsed); //71

For any serious applications that require fine-grained control over date and time objects, we recommend using libraries such as Moment.js (https://github.com/moment/moment), Timezone.js (https://github.com/mde/timezone-js), or date.js (https://github.com/MatthewMueller/date). These libraries simplify a lot of recurrent tasks for you and help you focus on other important things.

The + operator, when used as a unary, does not have any effect on a number. However, when applied to a String, the + operator converts it to numbers as follows:

var a=25;
a=+a;            //No impact on a's value  
console.log(a);  //25

var b="70";
console.log(typeof b); //string
b=+b;           //converts string to number
console.log(b); //70
console.log(typeof b); //number

The + operator is used often by a programmer to quickly convert a numeric representation of a String to a number. However, if the String literal is not something that can be converted to a number, you get slightly unpredictable results as follows:

var c="foo";
c=+c;            //Converts foo to number
console.log(c);  //NaN
console.log(typeof c);  //number

var zero="";
zero=+zero; //empty strings are converted to 0
console.log(zero);
console.log(typeof zero);

We will discuss the effects of the + operator on several other data types later in the text.

The ++ operator is a shorthand version of adding 1 to a value and -- is a shorthand to subtract 1 from a value. Java and C have equivalent operators and most will be familiar with them. How about this?

var a= 1;
var b= a++;
console.log(a); //2
console.log(b); //1

Err, what happened here? Shouldn't the b variable have the value 2? The ++ and -- operators are unary operators that can be used either prefix or postfix. The order in which they are used matters. When ++ is used in the prefix position as ++a, it increments the value before the value is returned from the expression rather than after as with a++. Let's see the following code:

var a= 1;
var b= ++a;
console.log(a);  //2
console.log(b);  //2

Many programmers use the chained assignments to assign a single value to multiple variables as follows:

var a, b, c;
a = b = c = 0;

This is fine because the assignment operator (=) results in the value being assigned. In this case, c=0 is evaluated to 0; this would result in b=0, which also evaluates to 0, and hence, a=0 is evaluated.

However, a slight change to the previous example yields extraordinary results. Consider this:

var a = b = 0;

In this case, only the a variable is declared with var, while the b variable is created as an accidental global. (If you are in the strict mode, you will get an error for this.) With JavaScript, be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

There are three Boolean operators in JavaScript—AND(&), OR(|), and NOT(!).

Before we discuss logical AND and OR operators, we need to understand how they produce a Boolean result. Logical operators are evaluated from left to right and they are tested using the following short-circuit rules:

Now we will explain the three logical Boolean operators:

Additionally, JavaScript supports C-like ternary operators as follows:

var allowedToDrive = (age > 21) ? "yes" : "no";

If (age>21), the expression after ? will be assigned to the allowedToDrive variable and the expression after : is assigned otherwise. This is equivalent to an if-else conditional statement. Let's see another example:

function isAllowedToDrive(age){
  if(age>21){
    return true;
  }else{
    return false;
  }
}
console.log(isAllowedToDrive(22));

In this example, the isAllowedToDrive() function accepts one integer parameter, age. Based on the value of this variable, we return true or false to the calling function. This is a well-known and most familiar if-else conditional logic. Most of the time, if-else keeps the code easier to read. For simpler cases of single conditions, using the ternary operator is also okay, but if you see that you are using the ternary operator for more complicated expressions, try to stick with if-else because it is easier to interpret if-else conditions than a very complex ternary expression.

If-else conditional statements can be nested as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else if (condition2) {
  statement2
} else if (condition3) {
  statement3
}
..
} else {
  statementN
}

Purely as a matter of taste, you can indent the nested else if as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else
    if (condition2) {

Do not use assignments in place of a conditional statement. Most of the time, they are used because of a mistake as follows:

if(a=b) {
  //do something
}

Mostly, this happens by mistake; the intended code was if(a==b), or better, if(a===b). When you make this mistake and replace a conditional statement with an assignment statement, you end up committing a very difficult-to-find bug. However, if you really want to use an assignment statement with an if statement, make sure that you make your intentions very clear.

One way is to put extra parentheses around your assignment statement:

if((a=b)){
  //this is really something you want to do
}

Another way to handle conditional execution is to use switch-case statements. The switch-case construct in JavaScript is similar to that in C or Java. Let's see the following example:

function sayDay(day){
  switch(day){
    case 1: console.log("Sunday");
      break;
    case 2: console.log("Monday");
      break;
    default:
      console.log("We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto");
  }
}

sayDay(1); //Sunday
sayDay(3); //We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto

One problem with this structure is that you have break out of every case; otherwise, the execution will fall through to the next level. If we remove the break statement from the first case statement, the output will be as follows:

>sayDay(1);
Sunday
Monday

As you can see, if we omit the break statement to break the execution immediately after a condition is satisfied, the execution sequence follows to the next level. This can lead to difficult-to-detect problems in your code. However, this is also a popular style of writing conditional logic if you intend to fall through to the next level:

function debug(level,msg){
  switch(level){
    case "INFO": //intentional fall-through
    case "WARN" :  
    case "DEBUG": console.log(level+ ": " + msg);  
      break;
    case "ERROR": console.error(msg);  
  }
}

debug("INFO","Info Message");
debug("DEBUG","Debug Message");
debug("ERROR","Fatal Exception");

In this example, we are intentionally letting the execution fall through to write a concise switch-case. If levels are either INFO, WARN, or DEBUG, we use the switch-case to fall through to a single point of execution. We omit the break statement for this. If you want to follow this pattern of writing switch statements, make sure that you document your usage for better readability.

Switch statements can have a default case to handle any value that cannot be evaluated by any other case.

JavaScript has a while and do-while loop. The while loop lets you iterate a set of expressions till a condition is met. The following first example iterates the statements enclosed within {} till the i<10 expression is true. Remember that if the value of the i counter is already greater than 10, the loop will not execute at all:

var i=0;
while(i<10){
  i=i+1;
  console.log(i);
}

The following loop keeps executing till infinity because the condition is always true—this can lead to disastrous effects. Your program can use up all your memory or something equally unpleasant:

//infinite loop
while(true){
  //keep doing this
}

If you want to make sure that you execute the loop at least once, you can use the do-while loop (sometimes known as a post-condition loop):

var choice;
do {
choice=getChoiceFromUserInput();
} while(!isInputValid(choice));

In this example, we are asking the user for an input till we find a valid input from the user. While the user types invalid input, we keep asking for an input to the user. It is always argued that, logically, every do-while loop can be transformed into a while loop. However, a do-while loop has a very valid use case like the one we just saw where you want the condition to be checked only after there has been one execution of the loop block.

JavaScript has a very powerful loop similar to C or Java—the for loop. The for loop is popular because it allows you to define the control conditions of the loop in a single line.

The following example prints Hello five times:

for (var i=0;i<5;i++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

Within the definition of the loop, you defined the initial value of the loop counter i to be 0, you defined the i<5 exit condition, and finally, you defined the increment factor.

All three expressions in the previous example are optional. You can omit them if required. For example, the following variations are all going to produce the same result as the previous loop:

var x=0;
//Omit initialitzation
for (;x<5;x++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

//Omit exit condition
for (var j=0;;j++){
  //exit condition
  if(j>=5){
    break;  
  }else{
    console.log("Hello");
  }
}
//Omit increment
for (var k=0; k<5;){
  console.log("Hello");
  k++;
}

You can also omit all three of these expressions and write for loops. One interesting idiom used frequently is to use for loops with empty statements. The following loop is used to set all the elements of the array to 100. Notice how there is no body to the for-loop:

var arr = [10, 20, 30];
// Assign all array values to 100
for (i = 0; i < arr.length; arr[i++] = 100);
console.log(arr);

The empty statement here is just the single that we see after the for loop statement. The increment factor also modifies the array content. We will discuss arrays later in the book, but here it's sufficient to see that the array elements are set to the 100 value within the loop definition itself.

JavaScript offers two modes of equality—strict and loose. Essentially, loose equality will perform the type conversion when comparing two values, while strict equality will check the values without any type conversion. A strict equality check is performed by === while a loose equality check is performed by ==.

ECMAScript 6 also offers the Object.is method to do a strict equality check like ===. However, Object.is has a special handling for NaN: -0 and +0. When NaN===NaN and NaN==NaN evaluates to false, Object.is(NaN,NaN) will return true.

var n = 0;
var o = new String("0");
var s = "0";
var b = false;

console.log(n === n); // true - same values for numbers
console.log(o === o); // true - non numbers are compared for their values
console.log(s === s); // true - ditto

console.log(n === o); // false - no implicit type conversion, types are different
console.log(n === s); // false - types are different
console.log(o === s); // false - types are different
console.log(null === undefined); // false
console.log(o === null); // false
console.log(o === undefined); // false

Though whitespace is not important in JavaScript, the correct use of whitespace can make the code easy to read. The following guidelines will help in managing whitespaces in your code:

If, else, for, while, and try always have spaces and braces and span multiple lines. This style encourages readability. Let's see the following code:

//Cramped style (Bad)
if(condition) doSomeTask();

while(condition) i++;

for(var i=0;i<10;i++) iterate();

//Use whitespace for better readability (Good)
//Place 1 space before the leading brace.
if (condition) {
  // statements
}

while ( condition ) {
  // statements
}

for ( var i = 0; i < 100; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

// Better:

var i,
    length = 100;

for ( i = 0; i < length; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

// Or...

var i = 0,
    length = 100;

for ( ; i < length; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

var value;

for ( value in object ) {
  // statements
}


if ( true ) {
  // statements
} else {
  // statements
}

//Set off operators with spaces.
// bad
var x=y+5;

// good
var x = y + 5;

//End files with a single newline character.
// bad
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);

// bad
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);↵
↵

// good
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);↵

Whether you prefer single or double quotes shouldn't matter; there is no difference in how JavaScript parses them. However, for the sake of consistency, never mix quotes in the same project. Pick one style and stick with it.

Whitespace can make it impossible to decipher code diffs and changelists. Many editors allow you to automatically remove extra empty lines and end of lines—you should use these.

Checking the type of a variable can be done as follows:

//String:
typeof variable === "string"
//Number:
typeof variable === "number"
//Boolean:
typeof variable === "boolean"
//Object:
typeof variable === "object"
//null:
variable === null
//null or undefined:
variable == null

Perform type coercion at the beginning of the statement as follows:

// bad
const totalScore = this.reviewScore + '';
// good
const totalScore = String(this.reviewScore);

Use parseInt() for Numbers and always with a radix for the type casting:

const inputValue = '4';
// bad
const val = new Number(inputValue);
// bad
const val = +inputValue;
// bad
const val = inputValue >> 0;
// bad
const val = parseInt(inputValue);
// good
const val = Number(inputValue);
// good
const val = parseInt(inputValue, 10);

The following example shows you how to type cast using Booleans:

const age = 0;  // bad 
const hasAge = new Boolean(age);  // good 
const hasAge = Boolean(age); // good 
const hasAge = !!age;

There are various stylistic guidelines around conditional statements. Let's study the following code:

// When evaluating that array has length,
// WRONG:
if ( array.length > 0 ) ...

// evaluate truthiness(GOOD):
if ( array.length ) ...

// When evaluating that an array is empty,
// (BAD):
if ( array.length === 0 ) ...

// evaluate truthiness(GOOD):
if ( !array.length ) ...

// When checking if string is not empty,
// (BAD):
if ( string !== "" ) ...

// evaluate truthiness (GOOD):
if ( string ) ...

// When checking if a string is empty,
// BAD:
if ( string === "" ) ...

// evaluate falsy-ness (GOOD):
if ( !string ) ...

// When checking if a reference is true,
// BAD:
if ( foo === true ) ...

// GOOD
if ( foo ) ...

// When checking if a reference is false,
// BAD:
if ( foo === false ) ...

// GOOD
if ( !foo ) ...

// this will also match: 0, "", null, undefined, NaN
// If you MUST test for a boolean false, then use
if ( foo === false ) ...

// a reference that might be null or undefined, but NOT false, "" or 0,
// BAD:
if ( foo === null || foo === undefined ) ...

// GOOD
if ( foo == null ) ...

// Don't complicate matters
return x === 0 ? 'sunday' : x === 1 ? 'Monday' : 'Tuesday';

// Better:
if (x === 0) {
    return 'Sunday';
} else if (x === 1) {
    return 'Monday';
} else {
    return 'Tuesday';
}

// Even Better:
switch (x) {
    case 0:
        return 'Sunday';
    case 1:
        return 'Monday';
    default:
        return 'Tuesday';
}

Naming is super important. I am sure that you have encountered code with terse and undecipherable naming. Let's study the following lines of code:

//Avoid single letter names. Be descriptive with your naming.
// bad
function q() {

}

// good
function query() {
}

//Use camelCase when naming objects, functions, and instances.
// bad
const OBJEcT = {};
const this_is_object = {};
function c() {}

// good
const thisIsObject = {};
function thisIsFunction() {}

//Use PascalCase when naming constructors or classes.
// bad
function user(options) {
  this.name = options.name;
}

const bad = new user({
  name: 'nope',
});

// good
class User {
  constructor(options) {
    this.name = options.name;
  }
}

const good = new User({
  name: 'yup',
});

// Use a leading underscore _ when naming private properties.
// bad
this.__firstName__ = 'Panda';
this.firstName_ = 'Panda';

// good
this._firstName = 'Panda';

The eval() method, which takes a String containing JavaScript code, compiles it and runs it, is one of the most misused methods in JavaScript. There are a few situations where you will find yourself using eval(), for example, when you are building an expression based on the user input.

However, most of the time, eval() is used is just because it gets the job done. The eval() method is too hacky and makes the code unpredictable. It's slow, unwieldy, and tends to magnify the damage when you make a mistake. If you are considering using eval(), then there is probably a better way.

The following snippet shows the usage of eval():

console.log(typeof eval(new String("1+1"))); // "object"
console.log(eval(new String("1+1")));        //1+1
console.log(eval("1+1"));                    // 2
console.log(typeof eval("1+1"));             // returns "number"
var expression = new String("1+1");
console.log(eval(expression.toString()));    //2

I will refrain from showing other uses of eval() and make sure that you are discouraged enough to stay away from it.

ECMAScript 5 has a strict mode that results in cleaner JavaScript, with fewer unsafe features, more warnings, and more logical behavior. The normal (non-strict) mode is also called sloppy mode. The strict mode can help you avoid a few sloppy programming practices. If you are starting a new JavaScript project, I would highly recommend that you use the strict mode by default.

You switch on the strict mode by typing the following line first in your JavaScript file or in your <script> element:

'use strict';

Note that JavaScript engines that don't support ECMAScript 5 will simply ignore the preceding statement and continue as non-strict mode.

If you want to switch on the strict mode per function, you can do it as follows:

function foo() {
    'use strict';
    
}

This is handy when you are working with a legacy code base where switching on the strict mode everywhere may break things.

If you are working on an existing legacy code, be careful because using the strict mode can break things. There are caveats on this:

function sloppyFunc() {
  sloppyVar = 123; 
} sloppyFunc();  // creates global variable `sloppyVar`
console.log(sloppyVar);  // 123

function strictFunc() {
  'use strict';
  strictVar = 123;
}
strictFunc();  // ReferenceError: strictVar is not defined

> 010 === 8 true

function f() { 
'use strict'; 
return 010 
} 
//SyntaxError: Octal literals are not allowed in 

JSHint is a program that flags suspicious usage in programs written in JavaScript. The core project consists of a library itself as well as a command line interface (CLI) program distributed as a Node module.

If you have Node.js installed, you can install JSHint using npm as follows:

npm install jshint –g

Once JSHint is installed, you can lint a single or multiple JavaScript files. Save the following JavaScript code snippet in the test.js file:

function f(condition) {
  switch (condition) {
  case 1:
    console.log(1);
  case 2:
    console.log(1);
  }
}

When we run the file using JSHint, it will warn us of a missing break statement in the switch case as follows:

>jshint test.js
test.js: line 4, col 19, Expected a 'break' statement before 'case'.
1 error

JSHint is configurable to suit your needs. Check the documentation at http://jshint.com/docs/ to see how you can customize JSHint according to your project needs. I use JSHint extensively and suggest you start using it. You will be surprised to see how many hidden bugs and stylistic issues you will be able to fix in your code with such a simple tool.

You can run JSHint at the root of your project and lint the entire project. You can place JSHint directives in the .jshintrc file. This file may look something as follows:

{
     "asi": false,
     "expr": true,
     "loopfunc": true,
     "curly": false,
     "evil": true,
     "white": true,
     "undef": true,
     "indent": 4
}

You can create a read-only named constant with the const keyword. The constant name must start with a letter, underscore, or dollar sign and can contain alphabetic, numeric, or underscore characters:

const area_code = '515';

A constant cannot change the value through assignment or be redeclared, and it has to be initialized to a value.

JavaScript supports the standard variations of types:

The Number type can represent both 32-bit integer and 64-bit floating point values. For example, the following line of code declares a variable to hold an integer value, which is defined by the literal 555:

var aNumber = 555;

To define a floating point value, you need to include a decimal point and one digit after the decimal point:

var aFloat = 555.0;

Essentially, there's no such thing as an integer in JavaScript. JavaScript uses a 64-bit floating point representation, which is the same as Java's double.

Hence, you would see something as follows:

EN-VedA:~$ node
> 0.1+0.2
0.30000000000000004
> (0.1+0.2)===0.3
false

I recommend that you read the exhaustive answer on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588004/is-floating-point-math-broken) and (http://floating-point-gui.de/), which explains why this is the case. However, it is important to understand that floating point arithmetic should be handled with due care. In most cases, you will not have to rely on extreme precision of decimal points but if you have to, you can try using libraries such as big.js (https://github.com/MikeMcl/big.js) that try to solve this problem.

If you intend to code extremely precise financial systems, you should represent $ values as cents to avoid rounding errors. One of the systems that I worked on used to round off the Value Added Tax (VAT) amount to two decimal points. With thousands of orders a day, this rounding off amount per order became a massive accounting headache. We needed to overhaul the entire Java web service stack and JavaScript frontend for this.

A few special values are also defined as part of the Number type. The first two are Number.MAX_VALUE and Number.MIN_VALUE, which define the outer bounds of the Number value set. All ECMAScript numbers must fall between these two values, without exception. A calculation can, however, result in a number that does not fall in between these two numbers. When a calculation results in a number greater than Number.MAX_VALUE, it is assigned a value of Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY, meaning that it has no numeric value anymore. Likewise, a calculation that results in a number less than Number.MIN_VALUE is assigned a value of Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY, which also has no numeric value. If a calculation returns an infinite value, the result cannot be used in any further calculations. You can use the isInfinite() method to verify if the calculation result is an infinity.

Another peculiarity of JavaScript is a special value called NaN (short for Not a Number). In general, this occurs when conversion from another type (String, Boolean, and so on) fails. Observe the following peculiarity of NaN:

EN-VedA:~ $ node
> isNaN(NaN);
true
> NaN==NaN;
false
> isNaN("elephant");
true
> NaN+5;
NaN

The second line is strange—NaN is not equal to NaN. If NaN is part of any mathematical operation, the result also becomes NaN. As a general rule, stay away from using NaN in any expression. For any advanced mathematical operations, you can use the Math global object and its methods:

> Math.E
2.718281828459045
> Math.SQRT2
1.4142135623730951
> Math.abs(-900)
900
> Math.pow(2,3)
8

You can use the parseInt() and parseFloat() methods to convert a string expression to an integer or float:

> parseInt("230",10);
230
> parseInt("010",10);
10
> parseInt("010",8); //octal base
8
> parseInt("010",2); //binary
2
> + "4"
4

With parseInt(), you should provide an explicit base to prevent nasty surprises on older browsers. The last trick is just using a + sign to auto-convert the "42" string to a number, 42. It is also prudent to handle the parseInt() result with isNaN(). Let's see the following example:

var underterminedValue = "elephant";
if (isNaN(parseInt(underterminedValue,2))) 
{
   console.log("handle not a number case");
}
else
{
   console.log("handle number case");
}

In this example, you are not sure of the type of the value that the underterminedValue variable can hold if the value is being set from an external interface. If isNaN() is not handled, parseInt() will cause an exception and the program can crash.

In JavaScript, strings are a sequence of Unicode characters (each character takes 16 bits). Each character in the string can be accessed by its index. The first character index is zero. Strings are enclosed inside " or '—both are valid ways to represent strings. Let's see the following:

> console.log("Hippopotamus chewing gum");
Hippopotamus chewing gum
> console.log('Single quoted hippopotamus');
Single quoted hippopotamus
> console.log("Broken \n lines");
Broken
 lines

The last line shows you how certain character literals when escaped with a backslash \ can be used as special characters. The following is a list of such special characters:

You get default support for special characters and Unicode literals with JavaScript strings:

> '\xA9'
'©'
> '\u00A9'
'©'

One important thing about JavaScript Strings, Numbers, and Booleans is that they actually have wrapper objects around their primitive equivalent. The following example shows the usage of the wrapper objects:

var s = new String("dummy"); //Creates a String object
console.log(s); //"dummy"
console.log(typeof s); //"object"
var nonObject = "1" + "2"; //Create a String primitive 
console.log(typeof nonObject); //"string"
var objString = new String("1" + "2"); //Creates a String object
console.log(typeof objString); //"object"
//Helper functions
console.log("Hello".length); //5
console.log("Hello".charAt(0)); //"H"
console.log("Hello".charAt(1)); //"e"
console.log("Hello".indexOf("e")); //1
console.log("Hello".lastIndexOf("l")); //3
console.log("Hello".startsWith("H")); //true
console.log("Hello".endsWith("o")); //true
console.log("Hello".includes("X")); //false
var splitStringByWords = "Hello World".split(" ");
console.log(splitStringByWords); //["Hello", "World"]
var splitStringByChars = "Hello World".split("");
console.log(splitStringByChars); //["H", "e", "l", "l", "o", " ", "W", "o", "r", "l", "d"]
console.log("lowercasestring".toUpperCase()); //"LOWERCASESTRING"
console.log("UPPPERCASESTRING".toLowerCase()); //"upppercasestring"
console.log("There are no spaces in the end     ".trim()); //"There are no spaces in the end"

JavaScript allows multiline strings also. Strings enclosed within ` (Grave accent—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent) are considered multiline. Let's see the following example:

> console.log(`string text on first line
string text on second line `);
"string text on first line
string text on second line "

This kind of string is also known as a template string and can be used for string interpolation. JavaScript allows Python-like string interpolation using this syntax.

Normally, you would do something similar to the following:

var a=1, b=2;
console.log("Sum of values is :" + (a+b) + " and multiplication is :" + (a*b));

However, with string interpolation, things become a bit clearer:

console.log(`Sum of values is :${a+b} and multiplication is : ${a*b}`);

JavaScript indicates an absence of meaningful values by two special values—null, when the non-value is deliberate, and undefined, when the value is not assigned to the variable yet. Let's see the following example:

> var xl;
> console.log(typeof xl);
undefined
> console.log(null==undefined);
true

JavaScript Boolean primitives are represented by true and false keywords. The following rules govern what becomes false and what turns out to be true:

JavaScript Booleans are tricky primarily because the behavior is radically different in the way you create them.

There are two ways in which you can create Booleans in JavaScript:

Both these methods return expected truthy or falsy values. However, if you create a Boolean object using the new operator, things can go really wrong.

Essentially, when you use the new operator and the Boolean(value) constructor, you don't get a primitive true or false in return, you get an object instead—and unfortunately, JavaScript considers an object as truthy:

var oBooleanTrue = new Boolean(true);
var oBooleanFalse = new Boolean(false);
console.log(oBooleanTrue); //true
console.log(typeof oBooleanTrue); //object
if(oBooleanFalse){
 console.log("I am seriously truthy, don't believe me");
}
>"I am seriously truthy, don't believe me"

if(oBooleanTrue){
 console.log("I am also truthy, see ?");
}
>"I am also truthy, see ?"

//Use valueOf() to extract real value within the Boolean object
if(oBooleanFalse.valueOf()){
 console.log("With valueOf, I am false");  
}else{
 console.log("Without valueOf, I am still truthy");
}
>"Without valueOf, I am still truthy"

So, the smart thing to do is to always avoid Boolean constructors to create a new Boolean object. It breaks the fundamental contract of Boolean logic and you should stay away from such difficult-to-debug buggy code.

One of the problems with using reference types to store values has been the use of the typeof operator, which returns object no matter what type of object is being referenced. To provide a solution, you can use the instanceof operator. Let's see some examples:

var aStringObject = new String("string");
console.log(typeof aStringObject);        //"object"
console.log(aStringObject instanceof String);    //true
var aString = "This is a string";
console.log(aString instanceof String);     //false

The third line returns false. We will discuss why this is the case when we discuss prototype chains.

JavaScript does not have a date data type. Instead, you can use the Date object and its methods to work with dates and times in your applications. A Date object is pretty exhaustive and contains several methods to handle most date- and time-related use cases.

JavaScript treats dates similarly to Java. JavaScript store dates as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00.

You can create a Date object using the following declaration:

var dataObject = new Date([parameters]);

The parameters for the Date object constructors can be as follows:

Here are some examples on how to create and manipulate dates in JavaScript:

var today = new Date();
console.log(today.getDate()); //27
console.log(today.getMonth()); //4
console.log(today.getFullYear()); //2015
console.log(today.getHours()); //23
console.log(today.getMinutes()); //13
console.log(today.getSeconds()); //10
//number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC
console.log(today.getTime()); //1432748611392
console.log(today.getTimezoneOffset()); //-330 Minutes

//Calculating elapsed time
var start = Date.now();
// loop for a long time
for (var i=0;i<100000;i++);
var end = Date.now();
var elapsed = end - start; // elapsed time in milliseconds
console.log(elapsed); //71

For any serious applications that require fine-grained control over date and time objects, we recommend using libraries such as Moment.js (https://github.com/moment/moment), Timezone.js (https://github.com/mde/timezone-js), or date.js (https://github.com/MatthewMueller/date). These libraries simplify a lot of recurrent tasks for you and help you focus on other important things.

The + operator, when used as a unary, does not have any effect on a number. However, when applied to a String, the + operator converts it to numbers as follows:

var a=25;
a=+a;            //No impact on a's value  
console.log(a);  //25

var b="70";
console.log(typeof b); //string
b=+b;           //converts string to number
console.log(b); //70
console.log(typeof b); //number

The + operator is used often by a programmer to quickly convert a numeric representation of a String to a number. However, if the String literal is not something that can be converted to a number, you get slightly unpredictable results as follows:

var c="foo";
c=+c;            //Converts foo to number
console.log(c);  //NaN
console.log(typeof c);  //number

var zero="";
zero=+zero; //empty strings are converted to 0
console.log(zero);
console.log(typeof zero);

We will discuss the effects of the + operator on several other data types later in the text.

The ++ operator is a shorthand version of adding 1 to a value and -- is a shorthand to subtract 1 from a value. Java and C have equivalent operators and most will be familiar with them. How about this?

var a= 1;
var b= a++;
console.log(a); //2
console.log(b); //1

Err, what happened here? Shouldn't the b variable have the value 2? The ++ and -- operators are unary operators that can be used either prefix or postfix. The order in which they are used matters. When ++ is used in the prefix position as ++a, it increments the value before the value is returned from the expression rather than after as with a++. Let's see the following code:

var a= 1;
var b= ++a;
console.log(a);  //2
console.log(b);  //2

Many programmers use the chained assignments to assign a single value to multiple variables as follows:

var a, b, c;
a = b = c = 0;

This is fine because the assignment operator (=) results in the value being assigned. In this case, c=0 is evaluated to 0; this would result in b=0, which also evaluates to 0, and hence, a=0 is evaluated.

However, a slight change to the previous example yields extraordinary results. Consider this:

var a = b = 0;

In this case, only the a variable is declared with var, while the b variable is created as an accidental global. (If you are in the strict mode, you will get an error for this.) With JavaScript, be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

There are three Boolean operators in JavaScript—AND(&), OR(|), and NOT(!).

Before we discuss logical AND and OR operators, we need to understand how they produce a Boolean result. Logical operators are evaluated from left to right and they are tested using the following short-circuit rules:

Now we will explain the three logical Boolean operators:

Additionally, JavaScript supports C-like ternary operators as follows:

var allowedToDrive = (age > 21) ? "yes" : "no";

If (age>21), the expression after ? will be assigned to the allowedToDrive variable and the expression after : is assigned otherwise. This is equivalent to an if-else conditional statement. Let's see another example:

function isAllowedToDrive(age){
  if(age>21){
    return true;
  }else{
    return false;
  }
}
console.log(isAllowedToDrive(22));

In this example, the isAllowedToDrive() function accepts one integer parameter, age. Based on the value of this variable, we return true or false to the calling function. This is a well-known and most familiar if-else conditional logic. Most of the time, if-else keeps the code easier to read. For simpler cases of single conditions, using the ternary operator is also okay, but if you see that you are using the ternary operator for more complicated expressions, try to stick with if-else because it is easier to interpret if-else conditions than a very complex ternary expression.

If-else conditional statements can be nested as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else if (condition2) {
  statement2
} else if (condition3) {
  statement3
}
..
} else {
  statementN
}

Purely as a matter of taste, you can indent the nested else if as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else
    if (condition2) {

Do not use assignments in place of a conditional statement. Most of the time, they are used because of a mistake as follows:

if(a=b) {
  //do something
}

Mostly, this happens by mistake; the intended code was if(a==b), or better, if(a===b). When you make this mistake and replace a conditional statement with an assignment statement, you end up committing a very difficult-to-find bug. However, if you really want to use an assignment statement with an if statement, make sure that you make your intentions very clear.

One way is to put extra parentheses around your assignment statement:

if((a=b)){
  //this is really something you want to do
}

Another way to handle conditional execution is to use switch-case statements. The switch-case construct in JavaScript is similar to that in C or Java. Let's see the following example:

function sayDay(day){
  switch(day){
    case 1: console.log("Sunday");
      break;
    case 2: console.log("Monday");
      break;
    default:
      console.log("We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto");
  }
}

sayDay(1); //Sunday
sayDay(3); //We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto

One problem with this structure is that you have break out of every case; otherwise, the execution will fall through to the next level. If we remove the break statement from the first case statement, the output will be as follows:

>sayDay(1);
Sunday
Monday

As you can see, if we omit the break statement to break the execution immediately after a condition is satisfied, the execution sequence follows to the next level. This can lead to difficult-to-detect problems in your code. However, this is also a popular style of writing conditional logic if you intend to fall through to the next level:

function debug(level,msg){
  switch(level){
    case "INFO": //intentional fall-through
    case "WARN" :  
    case "DEBUG": console.log(level+ ": " + msg);  
      break;
    case "ERROR": console.error(msg);  
  }
}

debug("INFO","Info Message");
debug("DEBUG","Debug Message");
debug("ERROR","Fatal Exception");

In this example, we are intentionally letting the execution fall through to write a concise switch-case. If levels are either INFO, WARN, or DEBUG, we use the switch-case to fall through to a single point of execution. We omit the break statement for this. If you want to follow this pattern of writing switch statements, make sure that you document your usage for better readability.

Switch statements can have a default case to handle any value that cannot be evaluated by any other case.

JavaScript has a while and do-while loop. The while loop lets you iterate a set of expressions till a condition is met. The following first example iterates the statements enclosed within {} till the i<10 expression is true. Remember that if the value of the i counter is already greater than 10, the loop will not execute at all:

var i=0;
while(i<10){
  i=i+1;
  console.log(i);
}

The following loop keeps executing till infinity because the condition is always true—this can lead to disastrous effects. Your program can use up all your memory or something equally unpleasant:

//infinite loop
while(true){
  //keep doing this
}

If you want to make sure that you execute the loop at least once, you can use the do-while loop (sometimes known as a post-condition loop):

var choice;
do {
choice=getChoiceFromUserInput();
} while(!isInputValid(choice));

In this example, we are asking the user for an input till we find a valid input from the user. While the user types invalid input, we keep asking for an input to the user. It is always argued that, logically, every do-while loop can be transformed into a while loop. However, a do-while loop has a very valid use case like the one we just saw where you want the condition to be checked only after there has been one execution of the loop block.

JavaScript has a very powerful loop similar to C or Java—the for loop. The for loop is popular because it allows you to define the control conditions of the loop in a single line.

The following example prints Hello five times:

for (var i=0;i<5;i++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

Within the definition of the loop, you defined the initial value of the loop counter i to be 0, you defined the i<5 exit condition, and finally, you defined the increment factor.

All three expressions in the previous example are optional. You can omit them if required. For example, the following variations are all going to produce the same result as the previous loop:

var x=0;
//Omit initialitzation
for (;x<5;x++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

//Omit exit condition
for (var j=0;;j++){
  //exit condition
  if(j>=5){
    break;  
  }else{
    console.log("Hello");
  }
}
//Omit increment
for (var k=0; k<5;){
  console.log("Hello");
  k++;
}

You can also omit all three of these expressions and write for loops. One interesting idiom used frequently is to use for loops with empty statements. The following loop is used to set all the elements of the array to 100. Notice how there is no body to the for-loop:

var arr = [10, 20, 30];
// Assign all array values to 100
for (i = 0; i < arr.length; arr[i++] = 100);
console.log(arr);

The empty statement here is just the single that we see after the for loop statement. The increment factor also modifies the array content. We will discuss arrays later in the book, but here it's sufficient to see that the array elements are set to the 100 value within the loop definition itself.

JavaScript offers two modes of equality—strict and loose. Essentially, loose equality will perform the type conversion when comparing two values, while strict equality will check the values without any type conversion. A strict equality check is performed by === while a loose equality check is performed by ==.

ECMAScript 6 also offers the Object.is method to do a strict equality check like ===. However, Object.is has a special handling for NaN: -0 and +0. When NaN===NaN and NaN==NaN evaluates to false, Object.is(NaN,NaN) will return true.

var n = 0;
var o = new String("0");
var s = "0";
var b = false;

console.log(n === n); // true - same values for numbers
console.log(o === o); // true - non numbers are compared for their values
console.log(s === s); // true - ditto

console.log(n === o); // false - no implicit type conversion, types are different
console.log(n === s); // false - types are different
console.log(o === s); // false - types are different
console.log(null === undefined); // false
console.log(o === null); // false
console.log(o === undefined); // false

Though whitespace is not important in JavaScript, the correct use of whitespace can make the code easy to read. The following guidelines will help in managing whitespaces in your code:

If, else, for, while, and try always have spaces and braces and span multiple lines. This style encourages readability. Let's see the following code:

//Cramped style (Bad)
if(condition) doSomeTask();

while(condition) i++;

for(var i=0;i<10;i++) iterate();

//Use whitespace for better readability (Good)
//Place 1 space before the leading brace.
if (condition) {
  // statements
}

while ( condition ) {
  // statements
}

for ( var i = 0; i < 100; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

// Better:

var i,
    length = 100;

for ( i = 0; i < length; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

// Or...

var i = 0,
    length = 100;

for ( ; i < length; i++ ) {
  // statements
}

var value;

for ( value in object ) {
  // statements
}


if ( true ) {
  // statements
} else {
  // statements
}

//Set off operators with spaces.
// bad
var x=y+5;

// good
var x = y + 5;

//End files with a single newline character.
// bad
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);

// bad
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);↵
↵

// good
(function(global) {
  // ...stuff...
})(this);↵

Whether you prefer single or double quotes shouldn't matter; there is no difference in how JavaScript parses them. However, for the sake of consistency, never mix quotes in the same project. Pick one style and stick with it.

Whitespace can make it impossible to decipher code diffs and changelists. Many editors allow you to automatically remove extra empty lines and end of lines—you should use these.

Checking the type of a variable can be done as follows:

//String:
typeof variable === "string"
//Number:
typeof variable === "number"
//Boolean:
typeof variable === "boolean"
//Object:
typeof variable === "object"
//null:
variable === null
//null or undefined:
variable == null

Perform type coercion at the beginning of the statement as follows:

// bad
const totalScore = this.reviewScore + '';
// good
const totalScore = String(this.reviewScore);

Use parseInt() for Numbers and always with a radix for the type casting:

const inputValue = '4';
// bad
const val = new Number(inputValue);
// bad
const val = +inputValue;
// bad
const val = inputValue >> 0;
// bad
const val = parseInt(inputValue);
// good
const val = Number(inputValue);
// good
const val = parseInt(inputValue, 10);

The following example shows you how to type cast using Booleans:

const age = 0;  // bad 
const hasAge = new Boolean(age);  // good 
const hasAge = Boolean(age); // good 
const hasAge = !!age;

There are various stylistic guidelines around conditional statements. Let's study the following code:

// When evaluating that array has length,
// WRONG:
if ( array.length > 0 ) ...

// evaluate truthiness(GOOD):
if ( array.length ) ...

// When evaluating that an array is empty,
// (BAD):
if ( array.length === 0 ) ...

// evaluate truthiness(GOOD):
if ( !array.length ) ...

// When checking if string is not empty,
// (BAD):
if ( string !== "" ) ...

// evaluate truthiness (GOOD):
if ( string ) ...

// When checking if a string is empty,
// BAD:
if ( string === "" ) ...

// evaluate falsy-ness (GOOD):
if ( !string ) ...

// When checking if a reference is true,
// BAD:
if ( foo === true ) ...

// GOOD
if ( foo ) ...

// When checking if a reference is false,
// BAD:
if ( foo === false ) ...

// GOOD
if ( !foo ) ...

// this will also match: 0, "", null, undefined, NaN
// If you MUST test for a boolean false, then use
if ( foo === false ) ...

// a reference that might be null or undefined, but NOT false, "" or 0,
// BAD:
if ( foo === null || foo === undefined ) ...

// GOOD
if ( foo == null ) ...

// Don't complicate matters
return x === 0 ? 'sunday' : x === 1 ? 'Monday' : 'Tuesday';

// Better:
if (x === 0) {
    return 'Sunday';
} else if (x === 1) {
    return 'Monday';
} else {
    return 'Tuesday';
}

// Even Better:
switch (x) {
    case 0:
        return 'Sunday';
    case 1:
        return 'Monday';
    default:
        return 'Tuesday';
}

Naming is super important. I am sure that you have encountered code with terse and undecipherable naming. Let's study the following lines of code:

//Avoid single letter names. Be descriptive with your naming.
// bad
function q() {

}

// good
function query() {
}

//Use camelCase when naming objects, functions, and instances.
// bad
const OBJEcT = {};
const this_is_object = {};
function c() {}

// good
const thisIsObject = {};
function thisIsFunction() {}

//Use PascalCase when naming constructors or classes.
// bad
function user(options) {
  this.name = options.name;
}

const bad = new user({
  name: 'nope',
});

// good
class User {
  constructor(options) {
    this.name = options.name;
  }
}

const good = new User({
  name: 'yup',
});

// Use a leading underscore _ when naming private properties.
// bad
this.__firstName__ = 'Panda';
this.firstName_ = 'Panda';

// good
this._firstName = 'Panda';

The eval() method, which takes a String containing JavaScript code, compiles it and runs it, is one of the most misused methods in JavaScript. There are a few situations where you will find yourself using eval(), for example, when you are building an expression based on the user input.

However, most of the time, eval() is used is just because it gets the job done. The eval() method is too hacky and makes the code unpredictable. It's slow, unwieldy, and tends to magnify the damage when you make a mistake. If you are considering using eval(), then there is probably a better way.

The following snippet shows the usage of eval():

console.log(typeof eval(new String("1+1"))); // "object"
console.log(eval(new String("1+1")));        //1+1
console.log(eval("1+1"));                    // 2
console.log(typeof eval("1+1"));             // returns "number"
var expression = new String("1+1");
console.log(eval(expression.toString()));    //2

I will refrain from showing other uses of eval() and make sure that you are discouraged enough to stay away from it.

ECMAScript 5 has a strict mode that results in cleaner JavaScript, with fewer unsafe features, more warnings, and more logical behavior. The normal (non-strict) mode is also called sloppy mode. The strict mode can help you avoid a few sloppy programming practices. If you are starting a new JavaScript project, I would highly recommend that you use the strict mode by default.

You switch on the strict mode by typing the following line first in your JavaScript file or in your <script> element:

'use strict';

Note that JavaScript engines that don't support ECMAScript 5 will simply ignore the preceding statement and continue as non-strict mode.

If you want to switch on the strict mode per function, you can do it as follows:

function foo() {
    'use strict';
    
}

This is handy when you are working with a legacy code base where switching on the strict mode everywhere may break things.

If you are working on an existing legacy code, be careful because using the strict mode can break things. There are caveats on this:

function sloppyFunc() {
  sloppyVar = 123; 
} sloppyFunc();  // creates global variable `sloppyVar`
console.log(sloppyVar);  // 123

function strictFunc() {
  'use strict';
  strictVar = 123;
}
strictFunc();  // ReferenceError: strictVar is not defined

> 010 === 8 true

function f() { 
'use strict'; 
return 010 
} 
//SyntaxError: Octal literals are not allowed in 

JSHint is a program that flags suspicious usage in programs written in JavaScript. The core project consists of a library itself as well as a command line interface (CLI) program distributed as a Node module.

If you have Node.js installed, you can install JSHint using npm as follows:

npm install jshint –g

Once JSHint is installed, you can lint a single or multiple JavaScript files. Save the following JavaScript code snippet in the test.js file:

function f(condition) {
  switch (condition) {
  case 1:
    console.log(1);
  case 2:
    console.log(1);
  }
}

When we run the file using JSHint, it will warn us of a missing break statement in the switch case as follows:

>jshint test.js
test.js: line 4, col 19, Expected a 'break' statement before 'case'.
1 error

JSHint is configurable to suit your needs. Check the documentation at http://jshint.com/docs/ to see how you can customize JSHint according to your project needs. I use JSHint extensively and suggest you start using it. You will be surprised to see how many hidden bugs and stylistic issues you will be able to fix in your code with such a simple tool.

You can run JSHint at the root of your project and lint the entire project. You can place JSHint directives in the .jshintrc file. This file may look something as follows:

{
     "asi": false,
     "expr": true,
     "loopfunc": true,
     "curly": false,
     "evil": true,
     "white": true,
     "undef": true,
     "indent": 4
}

The Number type can represent both 32-bit integer and 64-bit floating point values. For example, the following line of code declares a variable to hold an integer value, which is defined by the literal 555:

var aNumber = 555;

To define a floating point value, you need to include a decimal point and one digit after the decimal point:

var aFloat = 555.0;

Essentially, there's no such thing as an integer in JavaScript. JavaScript uses a 64-bit floating point representation, which is the same as Java's double.

Hence, you would see something as follows:

EN-VedA:~$ node
> 0.1+0.2
0.30000000000000004
> (0.1+0.2)===0.3
false

I recommend that you read the exhaustive answer on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/588004/is-floating-point-math-broken) and (http://floating-point-gui.de/), which explains why this is the case. However, it is important to understand that floating point arithmetic should be handled with due care. In most cases, you will not have to rely on extreme precision of decimal points but if you have to, you can try using libraries such as big.js (https://github.com/MikeMcl/big.js) that try to solve this problem.

If you intend to code extremely precise financial systems, you should represent $ values as cents to avoid rounding errors. One of the systems that I worked on used to round off the Value Added Tax (VAT) amount to two decimal points. With thousands of orders a day, this rounding off amount per order became a massive accounting headache. We needed to overhaul the entire Java web service stack and JavaScript frontend for this.

A few special values are also defined as part of the Number type. The first two are Number.MAX_VALUE and Number.MIN_VALUE, which define the outer bounds of the Number value set. All ECMAScript numbers must fall between these two values, without exception. A calculation can, however, result in a number that does not fall in between these two numbers. When a calculation results in a number greater than Number.MAX_VALUE, it is assigned a value of Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY, meaning that it has no numeric value anymore. Likewise, a calculation that results in a number less than Number.MIN_VALUE is assigned a value of Number.NEGATIVE_INFINITY, which also has no numeric value. If a calculation returns an infinite value, the result cannot be used in any further calculations. You can use the isInfinite() method to verify if the calculation result is an infinity.

Another peculiarity of JavaScript is a special value called NaN (short for Not a Number). In general, this occurs when conversion from another type (String, Boolean, and so on) fails. Observe the following peculiarity of NaN:

EN-VedA:~ $ node
> isNaN(NaN);
true
> NaN==NaN;
false
> isNaN("elephant");
true
> NaN+5;
NaN

The second line is strange—NaN is not equal to NaN. If NaN is part of any mathematical operation, the result also becomes NaN. As a general rule, stay away from using NaN in any expression. For any advanced mathematical operations, you can use the Math global object and its methods:

> Math.E
2.718281828459045
> Math.SQRT2
1.4142135623730951
> Math.abs(-900)
900
> Math.pow(2,3)
8

You can use the parseInt() and parseFloat() methods to convert a string expression to an integer or float:

> parseInt("230",10);
230
> parseInt("010",10);
10
> parseInt("010",8); //octal base
8
> parseInt("010",2); //binary
2
> + "4"
4

With parseInt(), you should provide an explicit base to prevent nasty surprises on older browsers. The last trick is just using a + sign to auto-convert the "42" string to a number, 42. It is also prudent to handle the parseInt() result with isNaN(). Let's see the following example:

var underterminedValue = "elephant";
if (isNaN(parseInt(underterminedValue,2))) 
{
   console.log("handle not a number case");
}
else
{
   console.log("handle number case");
}

In this example, you are not sure of the type of the value that the underterminedValue variable can hold if the value is being set from an external interface. If isNaN() is not handled, parseInt() will cause an exception and the program can crash.

In JavaScript, strings are a sequence of Unicode characters (each character takes 16 bits). Each character in the string can be accessed by its index. The first character index is zero. Strings are enclosed inside " or '—both are valid ways to represent strings. Let's see the following:

> console.log("Hippopotamus chewing gum");
Hippopotamus chewing gum
> console.log('Single quoted hippopotamus');
Single quoted hippopotamus
> console.log("Broken \n lines");
Broken
 lines

The last line shows you how certain character literals when escaped with a backslash \ can be used as special characters. The following is a list of such special characters:

You get default support for special characters and Unicode literals with JavaScript strings:

> '\xA9'
'©'
> '\u00A9'
'©'

One important thing about JavaScript Strings, Numbers, and Booleans is that they actually have wrapper objects around their primitive equivalent. The following example shows the usage of the wrapper objects:

var s = new String("dummy"); //Creates a String object
console.log(s); //"dummy"
console.log(typeof s); //"object"
var nonObject = "1" + "2"; //Create a String primitive 
console.log(typeof nonObject); //"string"
var objString = new String("1" + "2"); //Creates a String object
console.log(typeof objString); //"object"
//Helper functions
console.log("Hello".length); //5
console.log("Hello".charAt(0)); //"H"
console.log("Hello".charAt(1)); //"e"
console.log("Hello".indexOf("e")); //1
console.log("Hello".lastIndexOf("l")); //3
console.log("Hello".startsWith("H")); //true
console.log("Hello".endsWith("o")); //true
console.log("Hello".includes("X")); //false
var splitStringByWords = "Hello World".split(" ");
console.log(splitStringByWords); //["Hello", "World"]
var splitStringByChars = "Hello World".split("");
console.log(splitStringByChars); //["H", "e", "l", "l", "o", " ", "W", "o", "r", "l", "d"]
console.log("lowercasestring".toUpperCase()); //"LOWERCASESTRING"
console.log("UPPPERCASESTRING".toLowerCase()); //"upppercasestring"
console.log("There are no spaces in the end     ".trim()); //"There are no spaces in the end"

JavaScript allows multiline strings also. Strings enclosed within ` (Grave accent—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent) are considered multiline. Let's see the following example:

> console.log(`string text on first line
string text on second line `);
"string text on first line
string text on second line "

This kind of string is also known as a template string and can be used for string interpolation. JavaScript allows Python-like string interpolation using this syntax.

Normally, you would do something similar to the following:

var a=1, b=2;
console.log("Sum of values is :" + (a+b) + " and multiplication is :" + (a*b));

However, with string interpolation, things become a bit clearer:

console.log(`Sum of values is :${a+b} and multiplication is : ${a*b}`);

JavaScript indicates an absence of meaningful values by two special values—null, when the non-value is deliberate, and undefined, when the value is not assigned to the variable yet. Let's see the following example:

> var xl;
> console.log(typeof xl);
undefined
> console.log(null==undefined);
true

JavaScript Boolean primitives are represented by true and false keywords. The following rules govern what becomes false and what turns out to be true:

JavaScript Booleans are tricky primarily because the behavior is radically different in the way you create them.

There are two ways in which you can create Booleans in JavaScript:

Both these methods return expected truthy or falsy values. However, if you create a Boolean object using the new operator, things can go really wrong.

Essentially, when you use the new operator and the Boolean(value) constructor, you don't get a primitive true or false in return, you get an object instead—and unfortunately, JavaScript considers an object as truthy:

var oBooleanTrue = new Boolean(true);
var oBooleanFalse = new Boolean(false);
console.log(oBooleanTrue); //true
console.log(typeof oBooleanTrue); //object
if(oBooleanFalse){
 console.log("I am seriously truthy, don't believe me");
}
>"I am seriously truthy, don't believe me"

if(oBooleanTrue){
 console.log("I am also truthy, see ?");
}
>"I am also truthy, see ?"

//Use valueOf() to extract real value within the Boolean object
if(oBooleanFalse.valueOf()){
 console.log("With valueOf, I am false");  
}else{
 console.log("Without valueOf, I am still truthy");
}
>"Without valueOf, I am still truthy"

So, the smart thing to do is to always avoid Boolean constructors to create a new Boolean object. It breaks the fundamental contract of Boolean logic and you should stay away from such difficult-to-debug buggy code.

One of the problems with using reference types to store values has been the use of the typeof operator, which returns object no matter what type of object is being referenced. To provide a solution, you can use the instanceof operator. Let's see some examples:

var aStringObject = new String("string");
console.log(typeof aStringObject);        //"object"
console.log(aStringObject instanceof String);    //true
var aString = "This is a string";
console.log(aString instanceof String);     //false

The third line returns false. We will discuss why this is the case when we discuss prototype chains.

JavaScript does not have a date data type. Instead, you can use the Date object and its methods to work with dates and times in your applications. A Date object is pretty exhaustive and contains several methods to handle most date- and time-related use cases.

JavaScript treats dates similarly to Java. JavaScript store dates as the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00.

You can create a Date object using the following declaration:

var dataObject = new Date([parameters]);

The parameters for the Date object constructors can be as follows:

Here are some examples on how to create and manipulate dates in JavaScript:

var today = new Date();
console.log(today.getDate()); //27
console.log(today.getMonth()); //4
console.log(today.getFullYear()); //2015
console.log(today.getHours()); //23
console.log(today.getMinutes()); //13
console.log(today.getSeconds()); //10
//number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC
console.log(today.getTime()); //1432748611392
console.log(today.getTimezoneOffset()); //-330 Minutes

//Calculating elapsed time
var start = Date.now();
// loop for a long time
for (var i=0;i<100000;i++);
var end = Date.now();
var elapsed = end - start; // elapsed time in milliseconds
console.log(elapsed); //71

For any serious applications that require fine-grained control over date and time objects, we recommend using libraries such as Moment.js (https://github.com/moment/moment), Timezone.js (https://github.com/mde/timezone-js), or date.js (https://github.com/MatthewMueller/date). These libraries simplify a lot of recurrent tasks for you and help you focus on other important things.

The + operator, when used as a unary, does not have any effect on a number. However, when applied to a String, the + operator converts it to numbers as follows:

var a=25;
a=+a;            //No impact on a's value  
console.log(a);  //25

var b="70";
console.log(typeof b); //string
b=+b;           //converts string to number
console.log(b); //70
console.log(typeof b); //number

The + operator is used often by a programmer to quickly convert a numeric representation of a String to a number. However, if the String literal is not something that can be converted to a number, you get slightly unpredictable results as follows:

var c="foo";
c=+c;            //Converts foo to number
console.log(c);  //NaN
console.log(typeof c);  //number

var zero="";
zero=+zero; //empty strings are converted to 0
console.log(zero);
console.log(typeof zero);

We will discuss the effects of the + operator on several other data types later in the text.

The ++ operator is a shorthand version of adding 1 to a value and -- is a shorthand to subtract 1 from a value. Java and C have equivalent operators and most will be familiar with them. How about this?

var a= 1;
var b= a++;
console.log(a); //2
console.log(b); //1

Err, what happened here? Shouldn't the b variable have the value 2? The ++ and -- operators are unary operators that can be used either prefix or postfix. The order in which they are used matters. When ++ is used in the prefix position as ++a, it increments the value before the value is returned from the expression rather than after as with a++. Let's see the following code:

var a= 1;
var b= ++a;
console.log(a);  //2
console.log(b);  //2

Many programmers use the chained assignments to assign a single value to multiple variables as follows:

var a, b, c;
a = b = c = 0;

This is fine because the assignment operator (=) results in the value being assigned. In this case, c=0 is evaluated to 0; this would result in b=0, which also evaluates to 0, and hence, a=0 is evaluated.

However, a slight change to the previous example yields extraordinary results. Consider this:

var a = b = 0;

In this case, only the a variable is declared with var, while the b variable is created as an accidental global. (If you are in the strict mode, you will get an error for this.) With JavaScript, be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

There are three Boolean operators in JavaScript—AND(&), OR(|), and NOT(!).

Before we discuss logical AND and OR operators, we need to understand how they produce a Boolean result. Logical operators are evaluated from left to right and they are tested using the following short-circuit rules:

Now we will explain the three logical Boolean operators:

Additionally, JavaScript supports C-like ternary operators as follows:

var allowedToDrive = (age > 21) ? "yes" : "no";

If (age>21), the expression after ? will be assigned to the allowedToDrive variable and the expression after : is assigned otherwise. This is equivalent to an if-else conditional statement. Let's see another example:

function isAllowedToDrive(age){
  if(age>21){
    return true;
  }else{
    return false;
  }
}
console.log(isAllowedToDrive(22));

In this example, the isAllowedToDrive() function accepts one integer parameter, age. Based on the value of this variable, we return true or false to the calling function. This is a well-known and most familiar if-else conditional logic. Most of the time, if-else keeps the code easier to read. For simpler cases of single conditions, using the ternary operator is also okay, but if you see that you are using the ternary operator for more complicated expressions, try to stick with if-else because it is easier to interpret if-else conditions than a very complex ternary expression.

If-else conditional statements can be nested as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else if (condition2) {
  statement2
} else if (condition3) {
  statement3
}
..
} else {
  statementN
}

Purely as a matter of taste, you can indent the nested else if as follows:

if (condition1) {
  statement1
} else
    if (condition2) {

Do not use assignments in place of a conditional statement. Most of the time, they are used because of a mistake as follows:

if(a=b) {
  //do something
}

Mostly, this happens by mistake; the intended code was if(a==b), or better, if(a===b). When you make this mistake and replace a conditional statement with an assignment statement, you end up committing a very difficult-to-find bug. However, if you really want to use an assignment statement with an if statement, make sure that you make your intentions very clear.

One way is to put extra parentheses around your assignment statement:

if((a=b)){
  //this is really something you want to do
}

Another way to handle conditional execution is to use switch-case statements. The switch-case construct in JavaScript is similar to that in C or Java. Let's see the following example:

function sayDay(day){
  switch(day){
    case 1: console.log("Sunday");
      break;
    case 2: console.log("Monday");
      break;
    default:
      console.log("We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto");
  }
}

sayDay(1); //Sunday
sayDay(3); //We live in a binary world. Go to Pluto

One problem with this structure is that you have break out of every case; otherwise, the execution will fall through to the next level. If we remove the break statement from the first case statement, the output will be as follows:

>sayDay(1);
Sunday
Monday

As you can see, if we omit the break statement to break the execution immediately after a condition is satisfied, the execution sequence follows to the next level. This can lead to difficult-to-detect problems in your code. However, this is also a popular style of writing conditional logic if you intend to fall through to the next level:

function debug(level,msg){
  switch(level){
    case "INFO": //intentional fall-through
    case "WARN" :  
    case "DEBUG": console.log(level+ ": " + msg);  
      break;
    case "ERROR": console.error(msg);  
  }
}

debug("INFO","Info Message");
debug("DEBUG","Debug Message");
debug("ERROR","Fatal Exception");

In this example, we are intentionally letting the execution fall through to write a concise switch-case. If levels are either INFO, WARN, or DEBUG, we use the switch-case to fall through to a single point of execution. We omit the break statement for this. If you want to follow this pattern of writing switch statements, make sure that you document your usage for better readability.

Switch statements can have a default case to handle any value that cannot be evaluated by any other case.

JavaScript has a while and do-while loop. The while loop lets you iterate a set of expressions till a condition is met. The following first example iterates the statements enclosed within {} till the i<10 expression is true. Remember that if the value of the i counter is already greater than 10, the loop will not execute at all:

var i=0;
while(i<10){
  i=i+1;
  console.log(i);
}

The following loop keeps executing till infinity because the condition is always true—this can lead to disastrous effects. Your program can use up all your memory or something equally unpleasant:

//infinite loop
while(true){
  //keep doing this
}

If you want to make sure that you execute the loop at least once, you can use the do-while loop (sometimes known as a post-condition loop):

var choice;
do {
choice=getChoiceFromUserInput();
} while(!isInputValid(choice));

In this example, we are asking the user for an input till we find a valid input from the user. While the user types invalid input, we keep asking for an input to the user. It is always argued that, logically, every do-while loop can be transformed into a while loop. However, a do-while loop has a very valid use case like the one we just saw where you want the condition to be checked only after there has been one execution of the loop block.

JavaScript has a very powerful loop similar to C or Java—the for loop. The for loop is popular because it allows you to define the control conditions of the loop in a single line.

The following example prints Hello five times:

for (var i=0;i<5;i++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

Within the definition of the loop, you defined the initial value of the loop counter i to be 0, you defined the i<5 exit condition, and finally, you defined the increment factor.

All three expressions in the previous example are optional. You can omit them if required. For example, the following variations are all going to produce the same result as the previous loop:

var x=0;
//Omit initialitzation
for (;x<5;x++){
  console.log("Hello");
}

//Omit exit condition
for (var j=0;;j++){
  //exit condition
  if(j>=5){
    break;  
  }else{
    console.log("Hello");
  }
}
//Omit increment
for (var k=0; k<5;){
  console.log("Hello");
  k++;
}

You can also omit all three of these expressions and write for loops. One interesting idiom used frequently is to use for loops with empty statements. The following loop is used to set all the elements of the array to 100. Notice how there is no body to the for-loop:

var arr = [10, 20, 30];
// Assign all array values to 100
for (i = 0; i < arr.length; arr[i++] = 100);
console.log(arr);

The empty statement here is just the single that we see after the for loop statement. The increment factor also modifies the array content. We will discuss arrays later in the book, but here it's sufficient to see that the array elements are set to the 100 value within the loop definition itself.

JavaScript offers two modes of equality—strict and loose. Essentially, loose equality will perform the type conversion when comparing two values, while strict equality will check the values without any type conversion. A strict equality check is performed by === while a loose equality check is performed by ==.

ECMAScript 6 also offers the Object.is method to do a strict equality check like ===. However, Object.is has a special handling for NaN: -0 and +0. When NaN===NaN and NaN==NaN evaluates to false, Object.is(NaN,NaN) will return true.

var n = 0;
var o = new String("0");
var s = "0";
var b = false;

console.log(n === n); // true - same values for numbers
console.log(o === o); // true - non numbers are compared for their values
console.log(s === s); // true - ditto

console.log(n === o); // false - no implicit type conversion, types are different
console.log(n === s); // false - types are different
console.log(o === s); // false - types are different
console.log(null === undefined); // false
console.log(o === null); // false
console.log(o === undefined); // false