Check out a free preview of the full Code Transformation and Linting with ASTs course:
The "Introduction" Lesson is part of the full, Code Transformation and Linting with ASTs course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

Kent C. Dodds introduces his Code Transformation and Linting course. He also reviews the course agenda and setup for coding exercises.

Get Unlimited Access Now

Transcript from the "Introduction" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> Kent C. Dodds: Yeah, my name's Kent C Dodds. This is a bunch of links and information about me. I work for PayPal. I live in Utah. I have a family. We're expecting another baby in September. So one wife, four kids coming up. So that'll be fun. And yeah, if you want to see what all these things are all about, I have my link to my slides right here, which if somebody could put that in the chat that be pretty awesome, kcd.im/asts-workshop-slides.

[00:00:30] Let's set up some expectations here so we're all on the same page. We are not gonna be doing air squats the whole time. We are gonna be talking about abstract syntax trees, gonna give an introduction to what that even is and why you should care, and give some practical examples of traversing and manipulating ASTs.

[00:00:55] It's gonna be super cool. I'm not going to give you a super deep dive into all the tools and ASTs. We will go pretty deep, and the exercises are part of what makes you learn ASTs. There's no shortcut to getting experience with ASTs, you just have to work with them a lot.

[00:01:16] And we'll be doing that a lot during this workshop. We're also not gonna actual publish a plugin package for ESLint or Babel. There are great docs for how to do that, and so I'll leave you to look at the docs for that. Most of what we'll be doing is working with the AST specifically.

[00:01:38] Okay, so the setup. The reason that I have everybody setup before the workshop is to make sure that there aren't any problems. And there was a problem somebody found this morning. Thank you so much to that person. Actually gonna give that individual a shout out. This guy, thank you.

[00:01:59] He found a serious bug for Windows users in particular. So yeah, regardless of your platform, I'd like it if you could run this setup again. I would recommend just blow away your directory or go rename your directory and start from scratch. And I'll leave this here for just a sec, or actually I'll just go the chat and paste this in.

[00:02:25] Cool, yeah, so you can have that running in the background. Change YOUR_EMAIL@DOMAIN.COM to your email. And yeah, so just a couple of logistics. Mark talked about it mostly, but just to make sure I cover everything. The way that we're gonna do things is for every exercise, well actually I'll cover this later, let's just get into things and then I'll talk about how we're gonna be doing the exercises and stuff in a sec.