Javascript Coding

Many years or even decades before HTML 5 was released in 2015 (v5.2 released Dec 2017) browsers were not standardised. JQuery was developed to help standardise features across different browser types. Now browsers are more standardised libraries like Jquery are less necessary.

Frameworks and libraries come and go but may be useful for some features on specific projects.

The Javascript specification group is TC39 github.com/tc39. To check what Javascript or JS features are available on different browsers see caniuse.com.

For beginner tutorials and JS reference https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript.

jsbin.com and codepen.com are javascript playgrounds. Existing code can be forked (copied to your own repository) and edited for your own purposes.

Software Version Control

Git git-scm.com provides open source version control.

The longer code is left without proper documentation the less likely you are to know what it was originally developed for. The commit phase of version control forces or encourages the writing of descriptions of what the code is for and what it does, or what was changed in the code and why.

readme.md files contained in git repositories describe what the code or project is for.

github.com is a community and social platform of and for developers. github has many first timer jobs to help debug portions of larger projects.

Debugging and linting

A linter is a helper program that will highlight syntax errors and semantic errors in code as it is written. Linting is the process that will analyse code for potential errors.

Avoid writing bugs to start with. Don’t write code that is not part of the main feature or main purpose the code is being written for.

Use breakpoint debugging rather than alerts or console logging to check for bugging. This way alerts and console logging does not need to be removed from code before it is released.

What makes good code?

• Performs as required
• Small in size – for better performance
• Low complexity
• Easy to maintain and manageable
• Readable and easy for someone else to follow