The following is a guest post by Faraz Kelhini. Some of this stuff is out of my comfort zone, so I asked Kyle Simpson to tech check it for me. Kyle’s answer (which we did during an Office Hours session) was very interesting. It was: 1) This article is technically sound. JavaScript doesn’t really have classes in a traditional sense and this is the way most people shoehorn them in. 2) We may want to stop shoehorning them in. JavaScript has objects and we can use them in the way they are intended to do the same kinds of things. Kyle calls it OLOO (Objects Linked to Other Objects). Here’s an intro. I’d think there is value in learning about both.
Having a good understanding of constructors is crucial to truly understand the JavaScript language. Unlike many other languages, JavaScript doesn’t support classes, but it has constructors to bring similar functionality to JavaScript. In this tutorial, we will explore constructors in detail and see how JavaScript utilizes them to make objects.
Constructors are like regular functions, but we use them with the “new” keyword. There are two types of constructors: native (aka built-in) constructors like Array and Object, which are available automatically in the execution environment at runtime; and custom constructors, which define properties and methods for your own type of object.
A constructor is useful when you want to create multiple similar objects with the same properties and methods. It
