Understand Abstract Syntax Trees - ASTs - in Practical and Useful Ways for Frontend Developers

Master abstract syntax trees, ASTs, with Wealthfront Engineer, Spencer Miskoviak. Spencer shares his understanding of ASTs, acquired throughout his career at Wealthfront and previously Handshake and Target, to help up-level your ability to maintain continuously evolving large JavaScript codebases, to parse, traverse, and generate abstract syntax trees and much more. Get started with abstract syntax tree fundamentals and dive deep into several practical use cases of abstract syntax trees in the full course, Practical Abstract Syntax Trees, here: https://www.newline.co/courses/practi....

As a frontend engineer, it can be difficult to appreciate ASTs because you likely don't use traditional compilers outputting bytecode as such. It is likely that you rely on tooling built on top of abstract syntax trees. Some common examples of frontend build tools or compilers that rely on abstract syntax trees are webpack, babel, and swc. However, ASTs aren't isolated to build tools either. Tools like Prettier (code formatter), ESLint (code linter), or jscodeshift (code transformer) have different purposes but they all rely on abstract syntax trees. It's not necessary to understand abstract syntax trees to be a productive and successful frontend engineer. However, having a basic understanding can boost your ability to maintain and make sweeping changes to any sized codebase in a safe and reliable way.

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Chapters
0:00 Course Introduction
02:30 AST Basics
08:25 Exploring an AST
12:47 JavaScript AST Ecosystem
14:34 Environment Setup
15:38 Generating a JavaScript AST
22:07 Traversing an AST
29:40 Preventing Runtime Errors (with Types)