Learn Grep, Immutable and Mocha

CMD+F in your text editor can only get you so far! In this course, we will learn to use grep and find, two powerful command-line utilities, to search through and explore our codebase. Learn to search specific files and folders, using regular expressions to look for -- or ignore! -- particular phrases. We'll cover how to search recursively, get more context on your results, and some simple tricks to make your searches faster and more targeted.


Once you're familiar with grep and find, you'll be able to quickly answer questions such as: Do I use this function anywhere other than my tests? Where does this file get imported? Whether you're working on a new feature, reading a codebase for the first time, or refactoring existing code, grep and find can help you work faster and more effectively.

A Unix command used to search files for the occurrence of a string of characters that matches a specified pattern.

grep

Use Grep for Fast Search from the Command Line

im·mu·ta·ble i(m)ˈmyo͞odəb(ə)l/ adjective - **unchanging over time or unable to be changed**.

Mutating data is the source of never ending headaches in software systems, and JavaScript code is no exception. Immutable data structures, pure functions, uni-directional data flow... you've probably been hearing these terms.

Immutable.js provides us the data structures and utilities that we need to start introducing this powerful concept of immutability into our applications.

Immutable.js provides many Persistent Immutable data structures including: List, Stack, Map, OrderedMap, Set, OrderedSet and Record.

immutable

Learn how to use Immutable.js

When you have a bunch of text to sift through, standard Unix command line utilities like `grep`, `sed`, `awk`, `cut`, `sort`, and `uniq` can help extract the information you want. For example, with a git log for a project, you might want to group commits by day in order to see which days you're most productive, or find out how many commits you made last year. In this lesson, you'll learn how to combine these commands with the pipe operator to extract this data from git logs.

Analyze Git Logs with the Command Line

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Sometimes our update logic is asynchronous. In this lesson we will investigate two ways in which we can write asynchronous update logic. 

…But, we will also discuss why asynchronous producers should be avoided, and how that can be done by better separating our logic. 

This lesson also demonstrates the “createDraft” and “finishDraft” APIs

Write Asynchronous Producers in Immer and Why You Shouldn’t

In this lesson we will send patches over a WebSocket to our server, and distribute them again from there.

Create a Simple WebSocket Server to Distribute Patches from Immer

Immutable.js offers methods to break  immutable structures into subsets much like Array--for instance it has the all powerful slice()--and unlike Array it offers functional methods like take() and skip(). You get the best of both the imperative and functional worlds.

Working with Subsets of an Immutable.js Map()

Equality checking deeply nested objects is painful. Fortunately Immutable.js makes this task easy with its .is() and .isSubset() methods. Let's see how we can take two different Immutable Maps() and check for equality.

Equality Checking with .is() and More

Immutable.js offers the fromJS() method to build immutable structures from objects and array. Objects are converted into maps. Arrays are converted into lists. The fromJS() method can also take a reviver function for custom conversions.

Using fromJS() to Convert Plain JavaScript Objects into Immutable Data

Understanding Immutable.js's Map() and List() structures will likely take you as far as you want to go with immutable programming. They have only small semantic differences between each other and the remaining structures in the Immutable.js family. Sequence, however, has one major difference: it's lazy--which opens a new realm of functional possibilities. Let's write a simple sequence to start.

Exploring Sequences and Range() in Immutable.js

Immutable.js iterables offer the reduce() method, a powerful and often misunderstood functional operator on which map(), filter(), groupBy(), etc. are built. The concept is simple: reduce transforms your iterable into something else, that's all. The name is misleading as you may or may not actually "reduce" anything. Let's replicate the groupBy() and filter() methods with reduce to illustrate how it works.

Transforming Immutable Data with Reduce

While Immutable.js offers .is() to confirm value equality between iterables it comes at the cost of referencing each key and value in both objects. For lightning fast equality checks, Immutable.js can produce a hash code based on an iterable's content. If two iterables have the same content, their hash codes will be the same. It's worth noting that this technique is unsuitable for mission critical application development since there is a chance, however slight, that checksums like these might collide. This is outlined here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_(computer_science)

Lightning Fast Immutable.js Equality Checks with Hash Codes

Sometimes you'll be looking for a string, but won't know which file it's in; or you'll want to find all usages of it within a directory. Learn how to use grep -r to recursively search all the files in a directory. 

Search directory contents recursively using grep

The Immutable.js Record() allows you to model your immutable data much like you would model data with native Javascript classes or objects. It differs from native classes because it cannot be mutated after it's creation and it *always* has a default value. It's an excellent construct in which to piece together your stores, be them Flux or some other storage implementation. Let's quickly create an Immutable Record().

Immutable.Record() as data models

Learn how to use find to identify filenames matching specified patterns. We'll use find to identify all .jsx files in a directory, or all test files in a directory.

Use find to search for filename patterns

Learn to use git grep to only search through the tracked files in a git repo. This is especially useful when you want to exclude build artifacts or locally installed dependencies, such as webpack bundles or the node_modules directory. You'll also note that git grep is automatically colorized - we'll see how to get the same coloring effect with grep --color.

Search the contents of a git repository with git grep

By default, grep displays the file path and the line where a match is found. Learn to use the flags -A, -B, -C, and -n to get more context, and view line numbers as well as the lines surrounding a pattern match.


Show context around matches using grep

By using wildcards and glob patterns with the special characters . and *, you can create regular expressions that describe what kind of text you're looking for, instead of just plaintext strings. 

Search for basic patterns using grep

Learn to use grep's extended regular expressions to describe more complex patterns. The `?` and `+` special characters describe optional patterns. The `?` character matches zero or one instance of the preceding term, and the `+` character matches one or more instances of the preceding term. To use these characters, you'll need to either escape them with backslashes or turn on extended regular expressions with the `-E` flag.

Use grep's extended regular expressions to find complex patterns

Learn to use the special anchor characters `^` and `$` to indicate the beginning and end of lines when writing regular expressions for grep. These line anchors are part of basic regular expressions in grep, so you don't need to escape them.

Specify line beginning and end in patterns using grep

You can describe classes of characters using bracket expressions. We'll use expressions such as [a-zA-Z] and [0-9] to search for alphabetic and numeric characters with grep.

Match classes of characters using bracket expressions with grep

Describe optional patterns with grep OR using the vertical bar character `|`. By using the `|` special character, you can write either-or style patterns. In this lesson we'll look for matches on "grey" or "gray". Like the `+` and `?` characters, the `|` character is part of extended regular expressions with grep, so you'll either need to escape it with a backslash, or use the -E flag.

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