Introduction

Have you ever been sucked into a round of spring cleaning? I don’t mean the kind where you put “Scrub the floors” on your to-do list and then you actually do it. Rather, say it’s a nice day so you open the window, but as soon as you do, a pile of papers blows off your desk. That’s fine, you’ve been meaning to organize those anyway. So you start filing, but without that stack of papers hiding everything, now you notice that your computer cables look all tangled and sloppy, and how long has that coffee mug been hiding back there? Before you know it, you’re taking your whole office apart. Once you start removing clutter, it’s hard to stop.

Writing cleaner JavaScript code

By now, you’ve likely started getting a taste for clean and simple JavaScript. And that’s wonderful. The new syntax allows you to do so much more with much less code. But you don’t need to wait for new syntax before you make a positive change to your code.

Let’s take a quick detour from new syntax to explore some older ideas, but with a new goal: making clean and predictable JavaScript code.

In this chapter, you’re going to clean up conditional expressions. You’ll revisit basic ideas, such as truthy and falsy values, ternary expressions, and short circuiting, with the goal of keeping everything simple and clean.

There’s also a practical side: Now that you have more tools to assign and work with data, you can reuse old ideas to further leverage the new syntax.

Example

Here’s a basic example: Let’s say you wanted to set the color on a value. If the value is a negative number, you want the color to be red . If the value is positive, you want it to be green.