CoffeeScript - Overview

At present, JavaScript is the fastest mainstream dynamic language available, and it is known as the lingua franca of the web. It is developed by Brendan Eich in the year of 1995 in 10 days.
Because of its effective features, JavaScript became popular and went global quickly. It was there in lab for a very less time, which was not enough to polish the language.

CoffeeScript - Environment

The Compiler of the latest versions of CoffeeScript is written in CoffeeScript itself. To run CoffeeScript files in your system without a browser, you need a JavaScript runtime.

CoffeeScript - Command-line utility

On installing CoffeeScript on Node.js, we can access the coffee-command line utility. In here, the coffee command is the key command. Using various options of this command, we can compile and execute the CoffeeScript files.

CoffeeScript - Syntax

In the previous chapter, we have seen how to install CoffeeScript. In this chapter, let us check out the syntax of CoffeeScript.
The syntax of CoffeeScript is more graceful when compared to the syntax of JavaScript. It avoids the troublesome features like curly braces, semicolons, and variable decelerations.

CoffeeScript - Data Types

CoffeeScript Data Types

One of the most fundamental characteristics of a programming language is the set of data types it supports. These are the type of values that can be represented and manipulated in a programming language.
As CoffeeScript compiles line by line to JavaScript, the data types provided by CoffeeScript are same as JavaScript. Except for the fact that CoffeeScript adds some additional essence.

CoffeeScript - Variables

Variables are nothing but named containers. You can place data into these containers and then refer to the data using the name of its container.

CoffeeScript - Operators and Aliases

CoffeeScript Operators

An operator is a symbol that tells the compiler to perform specific mathematical or logical functions. Let us take a simple expression 4 + 5 is equal to 9. Here 4 and 5 are called operands and ‘+’ is called the operator.

CoffeeScript - Conditionals

While programming, we encounter some scenarios where we have to choose a path from a given set of paths. In such situations, we need conditional statements. Conditional statements help us take decisions and perform right actions.

CoffeeScript - Loops

While coding, you may encounter a situation where you need to execute a block of code over and over again. In such situations, you can use loop statements.
In general, statements are executed sequentially: The first statement in a function is executed first, followed by the second, and so on.

CoffeeScript - Comprehensions

In the previous chapter, we have learnt various loops provided by CoffeeScript, while and its variants. In addition to those, CoffeeScript provides additional loop structures known as comprehensions.
These comprehensions replace the for loop in other programming languages, if we add the optional guard clauses and the value of the current array index explicitly.

CoffeeScript - Functions

A function is a block of reusable code that can be called anywhere in your program. This eliminates the need of writing the same code again and again. It helps programmers in writing modular codes.
Functions allow a programmer to divide a big program into a number of small and manageable functions.

CoffeeScript - Strings

The String object lets you work with a series of characters. As in most of the programming languages, the Strings in CoffeeScript are declared using quotes as −

my_string = "Hello how are you"
console.log my_string

CoffeeScript - Arrays

The Array object lets you store multiple values in a single variable. It stores a fixed-size sequential collection of elements of the same type. An array is used to store a collection of data, but it is often more useful to think of an array as a collection of variables of the same type.

CoffeeScript - Objects

Objects in CoffeeScript are similar to those in JavaScript. These are a collection of the properties, where a property includes a key and a value separated by a semi colon (:). In short, CoffeeScript objects are a collection of key-value pairs. The objects are defined using curly braces, an empty object is represented as {}.

CoffeeScript - Ranges

In the previous chapter, we have seen Arrays in CoffeeScript, while programming we will face some scenarios where we have to store a sequence of numerical values in an array as shown below.

numbers =[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]

CoffeeScript - Splat

In the previous chapters, we have seen how to define a function and invoke a function and pass arguments to it. In general, we can pass a fixed number of arguments to a function. While programming, we may face situations where we need to pass variable arguments to these functions. In JavaScript, we use objects to accept variable number of arguments to a function.

CoffeeScript - Date

The Date object is a data-type built into the JavaScript language. Date objects are created as new Date( ).
Once a Date object is created, a number of methods allow you to operate on it. Most methods simply allow you to get and set the year, month, day, hour, minute, second, and millisecond fields of the object, using either local time or UTC (universal, or GMT) time.

CoffeeScript - Math

The Math object of JavaScript provides you properties and methods for mathematical constants and functions. Unlike other global objects, Math is not a constructor. All the properties and methods of Math are static and can be called by using Math as an object without creating it.

CoffeeScript - Exception Handling

An exception (or exceptional event) is a problem that arises during the execution of a program. When an Exception occurs, the normal flow of the program is disrupted and the program/Application terminates abnormally, which is not recommended, therefore these exceptions are to be handled.
An exception can occur for many different reasons. Here are some scenarios where an exception occurs.

CoffeeScript - Regular Expressions

A regular expression is an object that describes a pattern of characters JavaScript supports. In JavaScript, RegExp class represents regular expressions, and both String and RegExp define methods that use regular expressions to perform powerful pattern-matching and search-and-replace functions on text.