JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

The underpinnings of tools like Babel and ESLint, Abstract Syntax Trees (or ASTs) are not nearly as scary as you might think. This is a collection of all the egghead.io lessons I (Kent) have put out there.

In this lesson, we’ll learn about the key technology used by JavaScript engines and tools like ESLint and Babel to run, lint, and modify your source code. The JavaScript Abstract Syntax Tree (or AST for short) is a JSON representation of your code that is represented by a tree structure. In this lesson we’ll explore that tree structure to get a feel for how code translates to an AST.

Introduction to Abstract Syntax Trees

In this lesson we’ll look at the amazing open source tool [ASTExplorer.net](https://astexplorer.net/). We’ll learn how we can use it to learn about ASTs generated by different tools. We’ll also see how it can be used to help us write plugins for ESLint, Babel, and other tools. The noted ESTree specification can be found on [GitHub](https://github.com/estree/estree).

Abstract Syntax Trees

Kent C. Dodds

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