Developer's Reading List

Dr. Dobb's Staff, October 23, 2012 New books on C++11, parallel programming, CoffeeScript, requirements, and more.
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Programming in CoffeeScript

by Mark Bates

CoffeeScript is one of several new languages that are emerging as the JavaScript revolution unfolds. Like Dart and TypeScript (Microsoft's recently announced language), CoffeeScript programs are translated into efficient JavaScript, which is run either in the browser or on back-end servers. The book, a mercifully short 300 pages, is broken out into two main sections. The first 160 pages are a tutorial on the language itself. It aims squarely at developers who already know JavaScript. There is no introduction to JavaScript or general programming topics. The author intelligently provides both the CoffeeScript and the resulting JavaScript to show how the constructs of the former map to the latter. (In the process, he illustrates how elegantly the CoffeeScript translator works.)

The second half of the book is a demonstration of a CoffeeScript project that uses node.js and backbone.js as the primary supporting software infrastructure. This section contains a lot of useful information on how to attend to the details that a full project requires: for example, setup issues, how to get CoffeeScript to work with the other components, unit testing, and the like.

The book is supremely readable: clear, concise prose with numerous examples sprinkled throughout. It's definitely a good place to start if CoffeeScript is your cup of tea (sorry, I couldn't resist!). Strongly recommended.


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