ES6 & Beyond

No matter how much you feel you’ve mastered JavaScript to this point, the truth is that JavaScript is never going to stop evolving, and moreover, the rate of evolution is increasing rapidly. This fact is almost a metaphor for the spirit of this series, to embrace that we’ll never fully know every part of JS, because as soon as you master it all, there’s going to be new stuff coming down the line that you’ll need to learn.

This title is dedicated to both the short- and mid-term visions of where the language is headed, not just the known stuff like ES6 but the likely stuff beyond.

While all the titles of this series embrace the state of JavaScript at the time of this writing, which is mid-way through ES6 adoption, the primary focus in the series has been more on ES5. Now, we want to turn our attention to ES6, ES7, and …

Since ES6 is nearly complete at the time of this writing, ES6 & Beyond starts by dividing up the concrete stuff from the ES6 landscape into several key categories, including new syntax, new data structures (collections), and new processing capabilities and APIs. We cover each of these new ES6 features, in varying levels of detail, including reviewing details that are touched on in other books of this series.

Some exciting ES6 things to look forward to reading about: destructuring, default parameter values, symbols, concise methods, computed properties, arrow functions, block scoping, promises, generators, iterators, modules, proxies, weakmaps, and much, much more! Phew, ES6 packs quite a punch!

The first part of the book is a roadmap for all the stuff you need to learn to get ready for the new and improved JavaScript you’ll be writing and exploring over the next couple of years.

The latter part of the book turns attention to briefly glance at things that we can likely expect to see in the near future of JavaScript. The most important realization here is that post-ES6, JS is likely going to evolve feature by feature rather than version by version, which means we can expect to see these near-future things coming much sooner than you might imagine.

The future for JavaScript is bright. Isn’t it time we start learning it!?