Anne Watson -- Octos -- JS-Scrabble

[annehwatson]

JS Scrabble

Congratulations! You're submitting your assignment!

Comprehension Questions

Question	Answer
What patterns were you able to use from your Ruby knowledge to apply to JavaScript?	Loops and conditionals. Using jest asserts was similar to minitest.
What was a challenge you faced in this assignment?	I'm not sure on the semicolon placement or if they are all there.
Do you have any recommendations on how we could improve this project for the next cohort?

[droberts-sea]

JS Scrabble

What We're Looking For

Feature	Feedback
Core Requirements
Git hygiene	yes
Comprehension questions	yes
General
score calculates score, has appropriate params and return value	yes
highestScoreFrom calculates highest scoring word, has appropriate params and return value	yes
Player object
Has name and plays properties	yes
Has play, totalScore, hasWon functions	yes
Has highestScoringWord and highestWordScore functions	yes
Overall	Good work overall! I've left some comments inline that you should review, but in general this is a solid submission.

[droberts-sea]

I'm not a big fan of organizing the letter scores in a switch statement like this. It's not very DRY (you've had to type case 26 times), but more importantly the data is intertwined with the code that uses it, which means there's no easy way to reuse this information.

For example, what if the player had a hand full of tiles, and you wanted to be able to display the value of each of those letters? You would have to copy/paste this switch in that code, or at least extract it to a method.

A better approach would be to store the scores in a hash:

const LETTER_VALUES = {
  a: 1,
  b: 3,
  // ...
}

then here you could use it like this:

word.forEach((letter) => {
  const value = LETTER_VALUES[letter.toLowerCase()];
  if (value) {
    totalScore += letter.toLowerCase();
  } else {
    throw new Error(`Invalid character ${letter}`);
  }
}

[droberts-sea]

Instead of throwing a string, you should throw an instance of Error. That gives you access to stack trace information. Something like this:

if (condition) {
  throw new Error(`Invalid word ${word}`);
}

[droberts-sea]

I like how explicit and intentional you are here about what the word scores should be. That makes these tests very readable.