ES 6+ crash course | Modern JavaScript Refresher
There are a lot of great JavaScript frameworks available for both frontend and backend like Angular, React, Vue, etc for the frontend as well as Node JS with a lot of frameworks for the backend.
One thing that is common in all those frameworks, they use the latest features of ECMA Script (ES).
If you want to use the latest JS frameworks effectively, you must know the latest features of ECMA Script. This ES6 crash course is there to help you.
Most of us used JavaScript in browsers for validation, basic animation, AJAX or JQuery. This was basically older JS (ECMA Script 5 or ES 5), released in 2009 and embedded in most browsers before 2016. This was an era when JS was not very powerful and JQuery was at its peak.
In 2015, ECMA Script 2015 was released commonly known as ES 6. It added many features to Java Script, and all modern JS libraries like Angular, React, Vue, as well as Node JS, started using those advanced features.
ES6 Crash course
If we wish to work with any of the latest JS library or Node JS, knowing those advanced JS features are very helpful. This is the missing quick crash course to learn new features of ES 6 (Released 2015) to ES 12 (Released in 2021)
How do ES6 get executed in the browser?
One major question many people have, many people still use old browsers. If I use the latest JS framework/libraries, using the latest features, how will it work in older browsers?
A valid question, we might not want to limit our web apps only to the latest browsers. The trick is, that the latest JS library/frameworks use tools like Bibel to convert the latest JS code to ES 5 so that your apps are supported even on older browsers. We need not worry about it right now, just in short, even if you use the latest version of ES, it will still work in older browsers (till the minimum supported version).
You may consider this page as a table of contents, where each link is a separate article to define the topic in greater detail. If there is no link, the article is yet to be published and will be published soon. You may want to bookmark this page and come back later to check the details of those new features.
Without wasting much time, let’s dive into new features of ECMA Script, starting from ES6.
New features in ES 6
ES 6, released in 2015, added a lot of new features to the JavaScript language.
- The let keyword
- The const keyword
- Arrow Functions
- Map Objects
- Set Objects
- For/of
- Classes
- Promises
- Symbol
- Default Parameters
- Function Rest Parameter
- String.includes()
- String.startsWith()
- String.endsWith()
- Array.from()
- Array keys()
- Array find()
- Array findIndex()
- New Math Methods
- New Number Properties
- New Number Methods
- New Global Methods
- Object entries
- JavaScript Modules
New features in ES 2016 (Unofficially ES 7)
The JavaScript naming convention started with ES1, ES2, ES3, ES5 and ES6. Since 2016 new versions are named by year (ECMAScript 2016 / 2017 / 2018 and so on). However, some people call it ES 7.
ES 2016, released in 2016 just added two new features.
- Exponentiation operator
- Array includes()