Ari - Octos - JS-Scrabble

[arrriiii]

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?	storing information in local variables and looping through arrays are all very similar to Ruby.
What was a challenge you faced in this assignment?	Overall javascript syntax and the logic for highestScoreForm function were the most challenging pieces of this project-- but once I applied the same patterns from our Ruby scrabble project, it became much easier to implement.
Do you have any recommendations on how we could improve this project for the next cohort?	Straightforward project. Curious if we could have use this syntax sooner-- < Scrabble.Player = class { >. It was difficult to google examples.

[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 a few comments inline for you to 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. When the data is intertwined with the code that uses it, 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]

Good use of a helper method to clarify this logic.

[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}`);
}