Show notes
Hi there friends So today, I wanted to talk about understanding the syntax
of JavaScript. Now, I most of us when we're learning JavaScript, we areintroduced to each part of syntax and some of its capabilities and we justkind of learn about that syntax through experience of working with it andthere's nothing wrong with that approach that's pretty like the the bestway to learn anything is really just practical application.But there are often things that you skip over when you just focus on
practical application ofThe of knowledge And especially if JavaScript isthe first language that you learn maybe because it does borrow syntax fromother languages. Maybe there are things that you just don't know arepossible or don't really have a good good grasp on because you don'tunderstand the fundamentals of that syntax in particular.So what I'm going to suggest to you is that anytime you see some syntax
that you're not super familiar with or you think it's one way but thingsaren't working the way that you expect or something like that. Anytime yousee something syntax? I want you to copy that code.Into a tool called AST Explorer dot net. It's AST is an acronym for
abstract syntax trees, which does sound pretty complicated but I promiseyou that it's nothing magic. It's something that you can learn but go toAST explorer.net paste in the code on the editor on the left and on theright side, you're going to see a representation of that code in what'scalled an abstract syntax tree.You can represent it as like an JSON object or something. And each element
of syntax.Has a particular node name and a type and as you click around youshould be able to see the name of the AST node for the part of the codethat you're looking at.And so AST Explorer can be a really great way for you to get an
understanding of what the different parts of the code represent for thecomputer and it can also help you get an idea of like, oh this is called animport specifier, but then when I do this with an object that's called anobject pattern.So, maybe those two things like the structuring and imports are not the
same.Thing which they aren't So you can go ahead and try some of that. Andyou'll get a little deeper understanding. The other nice thing about thisis that it makes those things Googleable. So instead of saying, hey what'sthat thing at the import statement or whatever.You can say I want to learn about import specifiers and then you can Google
around about that. So, hopefully that's helpful to use kind of interestingto play around with AST explorer.net. I wish you the best of luck and Ihope you have a stellar day and we'll see you in the future.
