5 JavaScript Style Guides — Including AirBnB, GitHub, & Google

Learn to code like a Googler

Brandon Morelli
codeburst
Published in
3 min readNov 5, 2017

Udemy Black Friday Sale — Thousands of Web Development & Software Development courses are on sale for only $10 for a limited time! Full details and course recommendations can be found here.

Whether you’re just starting to learn JavaScript, or getting ready for your big interview with AirBnB, here are 5 style guides that can help you write cleaner code.

What the heck is a style guide?

A style guide is a set of standards that outline how code should be written and organized. As you read through these guides, you can get an idea for how code is written at the respective companies.

Why do we need style guides?

For one main reason: Everyone writes code differently. I may like to do something one way, and you may like to do it a different way. That’s all fine and dandy as long as we each work on our code. But what happens when you have 10, 100, or even 1,000 developers all working on the same codebase? Things get messy very quickly. Style guides are created so new developers can get up to speed on a code base quickly, and then write code that other developers can understand quickly and easily!

Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide

A mostly reasonable approach to JavaScript

Airbnb has one of the most popular JavaScript style guides on the internet. It covers nearly every aspect of JavaScript as well.

You can view Airbnb’s style guide on GitHub.

Google JavaScript Style Guide

A JavaScript source file is described as being in Google Style if and only if it adheres to the rules herein

You can view Google’s style guide on GitHub.

Idiomatic JavaScript Style Guide

All code in any code-base should look like a single person typed it, no matter how many people contributed.

Another of the most popular JavaScript style guides, the Idiomatic guide is available in multiple languages, and is open to pull requests.

You can view the Idiomatic style guide on GitHub.

JavaScript Standard Style Guide

JavaScript style guide, with linter & automatic code fixer. No configuration. Automatically format code. Catch style issues & programmer errors early.

This style guide is used by many tech companies including NPM, GitHub, mongoDB, and ZenDesk.

You can view the JavaScript Standard style guide on GitHub.

jQuery JavaScript Style Guide

Want to commit some code to help make jQuery better? Read up on their style guide and learn how their JavaScript is formatted.

You can view the jQuery style guide on their website.

Closing Notes:

If you’re ready to finally learn Web Development, check out the The Ultimate Guide to Learning Full Stack Web Development in 6 months. If you’re just looking to improve your JavaScript Skills, check out: A Beginners Guide to Advanced JavaScript

I publish 4 articles on web development each week. Please consider entering your email here if you’d like to be added to my once-weekly email list, or follow me on Twitter.

If this post was helpful, please click the clap 👏button below a few times to show your support! ⬇⬇

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

Published in codeburst

Bursts of code to power through your day. Web Development articles, tutorials, and news.

Written by Brandon Morelli

Creator of @codeburstio — Frequently posting web development tutorials & articles. Follow me on Twitter too: @BrandonMorelli

Responses (10)

What are your thoughts?