Document all functions, their arguments and return values, and also any interesting or unusual algorithm or technique. Think of the comments as hints to the future readers of the code; the readers need to understand what your code does without readin…

Free and open source tools for doc generation: the JSDoc Toolkit (http://code.google.com/p/jsdoc-toolkit/) and YUIDoc (http://yuilibrary.com/projects/yuidoc). Process of generating API documentation • Writing specially formatted code blocks • Running…

Revisiting the code after some time has passed requires: • Time to relearn and understand the problem • Time to understand the code that is supposed to solve the problem As the application matures, many other things happen that require your code to b…

7.1 Singleton The idea of the singleton pattern is to have only one instance of a specific class. This means that the second time you use the same class to create a new object, you should get the same object that was created the first time. var obj =…

Scenario You want to use just the methods you like, without inheriting all the other methods that you’ll never need. This is possible with the borrowing methods pattern, which benefits from the function methods  call() and apply(). // call() example…

Loop through arguments and copy every property of every object passed to the function. And the result will be a new object that has the properties of all the source objects. function mix() { var arg, prop, child = {}; for (arg = 0; arg < arguments.le…

Shallow copy pattern function extend(parent, child) { var i; child = child || {}; for (i in parent) { if (parent.hasOwnProperty(i)) { child[i] = parent[i]; } } return child; } Deep copy pattern function extendDeep(parent, child) { var i, toStr = Obje…

No classes involved; Objects inherit from other objects. Use an empty temporary constructor function  F().  Set the prototype of  F() to be the parent object. Return a new instance of the temporary constructor. function Object(o) { function F() {} F.…

Commonalities • There’s a convention on how to name a method, which is to be considered the constructor of the class. • Classes inherit from other classes. • There’s access to the parent class (superclass) from within the child class. The function ta…

// the parent constructor function Parent(name) { this.name = name || 'Adam'; } // adding functionality to the prototype Parent.prototype.say = function () { return this.name; }; // empty child constructor function Child(name) {} inherit(Child, Paren…