No need for temporary variable (Javascript)

Assume you have a function, and that function has a param (called 'config' herein) which may be a string or an object. Inside your function, you check for the type and if it's a string, you want to make this strings value a property of your object.

My first, fast approach was this one:

var url = config;

config  = {};

config.videoLink = url;

My second approach looked like this:

var url = config;

config  = {videoLink: url};

I thought about what's happening in those statements and realized that the temporary variable 'url' is not needed, because javascript is executing the assignement from right to left, means I can override 'config' with an object that keeps the original value of config as a property. See this third & final approach:

config = {videoHash: config};

So Javascript builds the object, assigns the value of config (string) to videoHash and assigns this object to config, which now is a object as desired.

Signs that you are a bad programmer (Bad Programmers)

Quite interesting article: http://badprogrammer.infogami.com/

Coding Backwards

Now this is a really cool idea how to get a gerneral idea of the design you really need (and this is NOT the design that comes to your mind FIRST):

"I decided that I’d [...] write out a script using the yet unwritten API. I’d reverse-engineer a good design by pretending I’d already written one!"

"A better design quickly appeared when I forced myself to preemptively eat my own dogfood. Instead of shoehorning use-cases into a class structure I’d already designed, I coded backwards and the opposite happened: a design evolved from daydreaming about an API that I’d like using."

SOURCE: http://jameso.be/2011/08/19/coding-backwards.html

JS Module Pattern

var someModule = (function(){
//private attributes
  var privateVar = 5;

  //private methods
  var privateMethod = function(){
  return 'Private Test';
  };

  return {
    //public attributes
    publicVar: 10,
    //public methods
    publicMethod: function(){
      return ' Followed By Public Test ';
    },

    //let's access the private members
    getData: function(){
      return privateMethod() + this.publicMethod() + privateVar;
    }
  }
})(); //the parens here cause the anonymous function to execute and return
        
someModule.getData();
SOURCE: http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/book/

Javascript OOP Cheatsheet

var MyClass = function() {

    // self to get "this" in private / global / anonymous methods
    var self = this;

    // public var
    this.publicVar = 'public';
    // private var
    var privateVar = 'private';

    // public method
    this.publicMethod = function() {}
    // private method
    function privateMethod() {}
    // global method
    globalMethod = function() {}

}