Over the last five years, CoffeeScript has taken the web development world by storm. With the humble motto It's just JavaScript, CoffeeScript provides all the power of the JavaScript language in a friendly and elegant package. This extensively revised and updated new edition includes an all-new project to demonstrate CoffeeScript in action, both in the browser and on a Node.js server. There's no faster way to learn to write a modern web application. This new edition has been extensively revised and updated to reflect the current state and features of CoffeeScript. Every chapter has been revised and refactored, and new sections and a new chapter on testing have been added. If you already know JavaScript, this book will make your transition to CoffeeScript easy. If you're new to JavaScript, it's a great place to start. New in this edition: Automating setup with the Grunt task runner Using CoffeeScript classes with the Backbone framework Using CoffeeScript's simple callback syntax to interact with the Express framework A new chapter on client-side and server-side testing with Intern * A new project that gives you hands-on experience with browser-side and server-side CoffeeScript CoffeeScript is every bit as portable and effective as JavaScript. It aids development by adding a bevy of features, such as classes, splats, list comprehensions, and destructuring. These features make it easier to write clear, readable code, and by learning how these features work, you'll deepen your understand of JavaScript as well. This book is your complete guide to writing better JavaScript code, faster.

With the advent of HTML5, front-end MVC, and Node.js, JavaScript is ubiquitous--and still messy. This book will give you a solid foundation for managing async tasks without losing your sanity in a tangle of callbacks. It's a fast-paced guide to the most essential techniques for dealing with async behavior, including PubSub, evented models, and Promises. With these tricks up your sleeve, you'll be better prepared to manage the complexity of large web apps and deliver responsive code. With Async JavaScript, you'll develop a deeper understanding of the JavaScript language. You'll start with a ground-up primer on the JavaScript event model--key to avoiding many of the most common mistakes JavaScripters make. From there you'll see tools and design patterns for turning that conceptual understanding into practical code. The concepts in the book are illustrated with runnable examples drawn from both the browser and the Node.js server framework, incorporating complementary libraries including jQuery, Backbone.js, and Async.js. You'll learn how to create dynamic web pages and highly concurrent servers by mastering the art of distributing events to where they need to be handled, rather than nesting callbacks within callbacks within callbacks. Async JavaScript will get you up and running with real web development quickly. By the time you've finished the Promises chapter, you'll be parallelizing Ajax requests or running animations in sequence. By the end of the book, you'll even know how to leverage Web Workers and AMD for JavaScript applications with cutting-edge performance. Most importantly, you'll have the knowledge you need to write async code with confidence. What You Need: Basic knowledge of JavaScript is recommended. If you feel that you're not up to speed, see the "Resources for Learning JavaScript" section in the preface.