CoffeeScript is a language that provides common idioms, patterns, and best practices in a succinct syntax. It’s advantage is that you can write idiomatic JavaScript, in a modern and succinct syntax that abstracts the gory details.

Those gory details are what makes JavaScript such a flexible and powerful language. Understanding these basic javascript patterns and idioms are an essential tool for any web developer.

JavaScript, as you may know, does not have very strict type checking. The typeof operator can pretty much only tell you the difference between Strings, Numbers, and Objects. This just isn’t going to cut it if you need to make decisions based on specific Object types, including custom Objects. The good news is there is a way to get at this information in JavaScript pretty easily.