FAQ: Learn TDD With Mocha - Refactor II

Frequently Asked Questions JavaScript FAQ
1

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This community-built FAQ covers the “Refactor II” exercise from the lesson “Learn TDD With Mocha”.

Paths and Courses
This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

Web Development

Learn JavaScript Unit Testing

FAQs on the exercise Refactor II

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2

For the accumulator part of reduce - I would think we’d need something like totalSum = 0, to keep track of it, but reduce apparently doesn’t require that. Can someone help me understand why?

https://www.codecademy.com/paths/back-end-engineer-career-path/tracks/becp-test-driven-development-with-javascript/modules/fecp-learn-tdd-with-mocha/lessons/tdd-with-mocha/exercises/refactor-ii

3

See the docs for more information in how array.reduce() works, but basically when you have code like so:

const blah = [1, 2, 3];
const sum = blah.reduce((a, b) => a + b);
console.log(sum); // 6

a is initially assigned to the first element of the array.
b is initially assigned to the second element of the array.
The fat arrow is essentially the same as return, so the values are added together and returned
a then gets assigned to that returned value, and b gets assigned to the next element of the array.
This process repeats until there are no elements remaining to assign to b.
You can add an optional initial value. In that case a gets assigned to the initial value first, and b gets assigned to the first element of the array. The above process is then followed.

const blah = [1, 2, 3];
const sum = blah.reduce((a, b) => a + b, 5); // 5 is the initial value
console.log(sum); // 11
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4

Thank you for your explanation! I read the documentation, but it’s difficult to digest. Plugging and playing is probably a good idea

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