JavaScript Testing with Jasmine

Preface

All programmers want their code to work the way they intended. Jasmine, a popular testing framework for the JavaScript programming language, allows you to achieve that goal. Through coded specifications, Jasmine helps make your JavaScript work exactly how it’s supposed to. In this book, we’ll explore Jasmine in detail, from its basic concepts to its advanced features.

This book aims to explain the concepts of testing and test-driven development, as well as why they’re useful. It then aims to dive into Jasmine and explain how it can help programmers test their JavaScript code. By the end of this book, I aim to give readers an understanding of Jasmine’s concepts and syntax.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is intended for programmers who are familiar with some more advanced JavaScript features, such as closures and callbacks, and who have a general understanding of JavaScript’s prototype system. If you are interested in learning how to write reliable JavaScript code, this is the book for you.

Jasmine is useful when building a maintainable and scalable JavaScript application, either in a browser or on a server. It can help ensure that a browser’s client-side data models are performing properly, or that a server is correctly serving pages.

Jasmine is also useful for building reliable JavaScript libraries. It can help ensure that the exposed API of your library matches what you intend it to match.

Conventions Used in This Book

The following typographical conventions are used in this book:

Italic

Indicates new terms, URLs, email addresses, filenames, and file extensions.

Constant width

Used for program listings, as well as within paragraphs to refer to program elements such as variable or function names, databases, data types, environment variables, statements, and keywords.

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Using Code Examples

This book is here to help you get your job done. In general, if this book includes code examples, you may use the code in this book in your programs and documentation. You do not need to contact us for permission unless you’re reproducing a significant portion of the code. For example, writing a program that uses several chunks of code from this book does not require permission. Selling or distributing a CD-ROM of examples from O’Reilly books does require permission. Answering a question by citing this book and quoting example code does not require permission. Incorporating a significant amount of example code from this book into your product’s documentation does require permission.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to RockMelt for asking me to learn Jasmine.

Thanks to Pivotal Labs for creating Jasmine.

Thanks to my parents for their constant support.