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Functional JavaScript: Introducing Functional Programming with Underscore.js by [Michael Fogus]

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Michael Fogus

Functional JavaScript: Introducing Functional Programming with Underscore.js 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

by Michael Fogus (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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How can you overcome JavaScript language oddities and unsafe features? With this book, you’ll learn how to create code that’s beautiful, safe, and simple to understand and test by using JavaScript’s functional programming support. Author Michael Fogus shows you how to apply functional-style concepts with Underscore.js, a JavaScript library that facilitates functional programming techniques. Sample code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/funjs/book-source.

Fogus helps you think in a functional way to help you minimize complexity in the programs you build. If you’re a JavaScript programmer hoping to learn functional programming techniques, or a functional programmer looking to learn JavaScript, this book is the ideal introduction.

Use applicative programming techniques with first-class functions
Understand how and why you might leverage variable scoping and closures
Delve into higher-order functions—and learn how they take other functions as arguments for maximum advantage
Explore ways to compose new functions from existing functions
Get around JavaScript’s limitations for using recursive functions
Reduce, hide, or eliminate the footprint of state change in your programs
Practice flow-based programming with chains and functional pipelines
Discover how to code without using classes

ISBN-10

9781449360764
ISBN-13

978-1449360726
Edition

1st
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On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

O'Reilly Media
Publication date

June 1, 2013
Language

English
File size

3943 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Michael Fogus is software developer with experience in distributedsimulation, machine vision, and expert systems construction. He's actively involved in the Clojure and Scala communities.

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00D624AQO
Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (June 1, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 1, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3943 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 262 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,563,718 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #438 in JavaScript Programming (Kindle Store)
- #774 in Web Programming
- #977 in JavaScript Programming (Books)

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A programmer in the DC area specializing in artificial intelligence, code generation, and distributed simulation.

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61 global ratings

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John Peters

Fogus is a brilliant writer! The book is a deep dive but ...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 23, 2016

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Mr. Fogus is a brilliant writer! The book is a deep dive but very nicely explained, very methodical and stays on-track. The author is an expert in Javscript and an expert in all things Functional within Javascript.

I don't agree with some of the commentary, particularly many of the statements made about Object Oriented Programming as there's seems to be a lesser degree of knowledge of it based on the comments made. For example OOP has patterns, which just work. Those patterns came about by continual refactoring to get to the point where all code becomes a container for very low level generic functional programming styles. In that sense, there is virtually no difference between Functional Programming and OOP. Experienced OOP folks are already reducing code at it's lowest layer to functions that support dependency injection. They can, if wanted return functions to functions too.. JavaScript is not a magic bullet, rather it's a ubiquitous language that is fun and cool.

Michal is not a "Funtionista" but there are many of them out there bashing OOP by saying things like "OOP is the result of a bad programming language", while that may have been true in 1985, it's simply a joke to believe that's true any longer.

Thanks Michael for the superb job.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Benj

A bit outdated in mid 2016.....

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 18, 2016

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Keep in mind that this is a 2016 review. Since the book was published, es2015 was released, and there are many better functional libraries than underscore: ramda, immutablejs, lodash/fp, just to name a few. Also some of the quirks of javascript that are now resolved in es2015 are laboriously fixed by the author in this book but are a given in es2015. Today we have call tail optimization, default parameters, we have fat arrows to control the value of this, we have auto curried functional libraries..... all laborious topics that complexifies an already complex topic.

This is not an easy book.... you must already have a good level of programming and javascript. If this is your first functional programming book, and you are not already an experienced developer you will suffer.
There are today more pedagogic, modern alternatives to this book.

Actually I find I understand better all the topics presented by reading focused, recent blog posts !!

Still I don't regret purchasing and reading this book as it presents a good overview about what you need to know to program functionally.

10 people found this helpful

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Vivace

a bit too long

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 6, 2014

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the book is just sprinkled with the phrase " we will come back to this later in chapter x but its worth mentioning...." I just find that the material i just want to be bam bam is teasing me down a long path or is introduced via this method of first showing a long drawn out series of examples of how not to do it... something like "well you could do function(){....} ....but then....so instead function(){..alternative} and thats a little better...but...finally this is how we should really do it" and the whole time i am thinking man why is this so confusing?? why not just do it this way....and of course thats the way it ends up resolving...

the material is there but i think it would be a lot clearer and less arduous if it just got straight to the point.

3 people found this helpful

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ODZ

Keep it close

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 28, 2014

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I've read this book many weeks ago but it is still on my desk. I keep opening it and reading a random piece from it to refresh my memory. Some suggestions on this book feels more like a personal preference - for example writing only one var and chaining other variables names instead of typing var every time - however this book has shown me parts of javascript that I would normally would not even think about researching. It has given me another perspective on JavaScript. This book will not teach you JS, you should already know some. If you want to be a classy javascripter who writes fast and light js apps but do not know where to start improving yourself, this book is a great guide.

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Rafi Dudekula

Learn JavaScript functional style

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 25, 2013

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This is a must read book for all advanced JavaScript developers. JavaScript is a versatile language that supports dynamic, object oriented and functional styles, with some good (and bad) parts. Unfortunately that confuses most programmers whether they are from Ruby/Python world or Java/C# world.

Michael Fogus uses the excellent UnderScore.js library by Jeremy Ashkenas, to teach functional programming using JavaScript. The power of functional programming is too great to ignore. This book eases some pain in terms of building up step by step examples that illustrate functional programming thought process.

Though the first 3 chapters were relatively easy to understand the later chapters do get a bit complex. I intend to re-read this book, while working out code samples, for better understanding.

4 people found this helpful

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Kevin Duffey

Good but need to understand functional programming a bit to really utilize this book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 11, 2014

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Overall it's a good book. However, coming from Java and "old style" JavaScript where by I don't know any functional programming, the concepts of functional programming are not easy to grasp with this book. I suggest another book first on learning functional programming concepts. The content is pretty good though.

One person found this helpful

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Bruce M

Thought-provoking book for writing functional JavaScript

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 2, 2015

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An excellent thought-provoking book for learning how to write functional JavaScript and getting into that mindset. The only slight negative is that some of the examples seem a bit contrived/academic and not something you could realistically use in production.

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Peter M. Goldstein

Great discussion of functional techniques in Javascript

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 11, 2014

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I really enjoyed this book. I've had a fair exposure to functional techniques in other languages, but this book really drove home how to use those techniques in Javascript. Good tone and level of detail, and the appendix has pointers to a wealth of further reading.

One note - keep the Underscore.js docs handy, as the author makes extensive use of underscore.js without a lot of detail on how the functions work.

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Breakfast

JavaScript: The Better Parts

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 19, 2015

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If you're interested in taking your JavaScript to a more advanced level, this is a great book showing the functional side of the language ( which is strongly influenced by Scheme during its creation ) and giving you a chance to use it to explore functional programming techniques. I have read a few books on functional programming and the concepts have never fully stuck, but this one - perhaps because it starts with a language I already know in depth - has really helped me to grasp them and to see places that they would be useful.

It also gives a good introduction to the Underscore library, which I have used for a few years and now feels very much like the missing part of the language for me.

If you are an experienced programmer who wants to improve your JavaScript this is well worth a read, particularly if you come from a more object-oriented background in a language like C# or Java and you find yourself spending more time than you would like trying to understand what "this" refers to at any given point, this will really help.

An ideal follow-up to "The Good Parts" in any JavaScript programmer's education.

Mike

Worth reading if you use Javascript

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 26, 2013

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This book certainly isn't perfect. There are several minor errors in the printed code and output examples, so you probably want a good enough understanding of Javascript to be able to pick them out. Towards the beginning I found it would ramble in places and lead off on some odd tangents. Also, some of the examples comparing functional to imperative code seemed to unfairly attribute good programming practices to functional style. Examples include: returning early and avoiding the use of superfluous variables. Despite a few minor issues I still rate this book highly as I learnt lots of new and interesting things from it.

Underscore provides a set of useful functions that allow you to write shorter, more expressive code. If you are familiar with the ECMA5 array methods map, reduce and filter then you can expect browser independent implementations of those along with a load of additional utility method that can help simplify data transformations. If that is all new to you it may be worth having a play around with them before taking a look at the Underscore site.

Some of the content in the middle of the book repeats some of the stuff I have read in other Javascript books, such as The Good Parts, Javascript Patterns and Effective Javascript, but here the author does a better job of showing practical uses for functional style and explains what aspects of functional programming Javascript is best suited to. Up until now I hadn't really understood why i would want to use currying. It usually gets presented in its arbitrary length form as something you can do, but without reason as to why. Learning about partial application was one of the most fun bits, it allows you to write programs in a very different form. You may need to try applying the code in a practical context to fully realise the benefits, for me they were not always immediately apparent from reading the examples in the book alone.

There is a section on mutability that shows to good effect how referential transparency can help reduce bugs in code, but some of the other techniques for dealing with the mutability of Javascript objects seemed like nasty hacks battling with the language. Another good chapter explains chaining, lazy chaining deferred objects and pipelines. Deferred object are featured in many libraries, but in my experience were not always all that well documented. I can certainly see myself using pipelines in the future too.

At the end of the day, even if you are not particularly interested in functional programming, if you work with Javascript it's worth learning since most libraries have at least some functional aspects, plus you'll probably gain some appreciation for it along the way.

10 people found this helpful

William Watts

Dense, informative, quirky.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 23, 2015

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Functional JavaScript is a written as a working programmer's guide to melding a functional approach with the not-particularly-functional-even-if-better-than-Java JavaScript language. It takes a tutorial approach, leading the reader through a sequence of admirably compact code examples to demonstrate the selected functional techniques: higher order functions, recursion, immutability and pure functions.

To save himself developing a suite of boilerplate to underpin his functional style, Fogus uses the well-known Underscore library; initially to draw some of his early examples from real life usage, and subsequently as a background framework for the whole book. (You may, like me, prefer the alternative LoDash implementation of the same interface, which will disadvantage you not at all as far as this book is concerned.) However, the book is not about Underscore, and the author only uses it as a background to his main aims. Indeed, the code throughout is general-purpose and environment-independent; not tied to, for example, web browser programming or a Node-madic existence.

There are a lot of good things to say about this book. One thing is that it is, in places, quite dense, but somehow sustains the illusion that it is an light read (I also found this with Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts). It is quite easy to sail through chapters and suddenly realise that one has no clue about how a fragment of code works, and discover the need to backtrack a page or two and try again, with concentration turned up a couple of notches. This may sound like a criticism, but really it isn't: books that flatter and tempt the reader into wading out beyond his depth without realising it are actually the books that, in the end, create new swimmers. It is the one that bore you rigid that should be avoided.

Fogus's prose style is fairly light and entertaining - he know to put in some jokes without steaming up the lens with excessive humour. His ambition is admirable: these are quite complex techniques that are worth understanding: one can sense his enthusiasm and his desire to put things across. He has a good eye for a bit of code that demonstrates an idea in short form without being unbearably patronising. He occasionally pursues his red herrings a bit far, or attempts a line of discussion which doesn't really help much: I'd put the long discussion of scoping at the start of chapter 3 in this category. But much more hit than miss.

Also, Fogus is not above letting the boys have their toys. JavaScript notoriously can't optimise tail-recursion, so here is a coded up work-around that is fun to implement and will blow the heap before it blows the stack. Possibly not particularly practical, but hey! JavaScript can do it, dude.

There is 'but' that is implied by the missing star: I think the author has really been let down by his O'Reilly editor and his proofreaders. The first thing to do on getting hold of this book (in paper form) is to google up its errata website and ink in all the corrections. Really. Some of the proofing errors are doozies, if you take the book seriously you'll have enough on your plate following its thread without refinding what others have already flagged.

Once you have done this, don't put your red pen away. Fogus has the habit of supplying a function once and then referring to in code several chapters later. For example, construct() is a one line function introduced without any particular emphasis on page 39 in Chapter 2; when it resurfaced on page 116 Chapter 6 I had entirely forgotten it, and it is not in the index. This happens quite a lot, and it can be a sod to track the original down. Another irritating systematic failure: Fogus inserts his references in the academic style '(Touretzky 1990)', but his bibliography lists his sources by title, ordered by the order they happen to be on his bookshelf - making the references tedious to resolve. Apart from this sort of thing, minor typos litter the book, but that perhaps infuriates only sad obsessives like myself. But from O'Reilly, I expect more.

Otherwise: yeah, go for it.

One person found this helpful

Juan Jose

So focused to teach underscore.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 4, 2015

Verified Purchase

Is not a bad book. Maybe I was confused. Basically it teach you 80% the underscore api and 20% examples of how to nest functions to do functional programming.

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