Chapter 1. Enter the ninja
This chapter covers
- A look at the purpose and structure of this book
- Which libraries we’ll look at
- What is “advanced” JavaScript programming?
- Cross-browser authoring
- Test suite examples
If you’re reading this book, you know that there’s nothing simple about creating effective and cross-browser JavaScript code. In addition to the normal challenges of writing clean code, we have the added complexity of dealing with obtuse browser differences and complexities. To deal with these challenges, JavaScript developers frequently capture sets of common and reusable functionality in the form of JavaScript libraries.
These libraries vary widely in approach, content, and complexity, but one constant remains: they need to be easy to use, incur the least amount of overhead, and be able to work across all browsers that we wish to target.
It stands to reason, then, that understanding how the very best JavaScript libraries are constructed can provide us with great insight into how our own code can be constructed to achieve these same goals. This book sets out to uncover the techniques and secrets used by these world-class code bases and to gather them into a single resource.
In this book we’ll be examining the techniques that were (and continue to be) used to create the popular JavaScript libraries. Let’s meet those libraries!