Simplifying JavaScript

Introduction

Ever get the feeling you’ve woken up and everything’s different? If you’ve looked at modern JavaScript, you may feel like you woke up in a new world where nothing’s the same.

Yesterday, you were tweaking a simple jQuery accordion. Today, you look at some JavaScript code and the ubiquitous jQuery $ operator is gone. In its place are lots of strange dots (...) and strange symbols (=>) (the spread operator and arrow functions, as you’ll soon learn). Sure, some things look familiar, such as class, but even that seems to be unpredictable (where are the private methods?).

Are you perplexed? Maybe a little excited? Well, I have good news for you: Everything has changed for the better.

When the ECMAScript 6 spec was released—ES6 ...