Mastering Inheritance: A Practical Guide to Prototypes in JavaScript

Unlock the power of prototypes and create robust inheritance chains in your JavaScript applications

Max N
2 min readApr 5, 2024
Photo by Joan Gamell on Unsplash

JavaScript is a powerful language that allows developers to leverage the concept of prototypes to create inheritance chains. Understanding how prototypes work is crucial for writing maintainable and scalable code.

In this article, we’ll explore the fundamentals of prototypes and demonstrate how to use them to create inheritance chains.

Prototypes: The Backbone of JavaScript

In JavaScript, every object has a prototype, which is another object. This prototype serves as a blueprint for the object, providing it with properties and methods. When you try to access a property or method on an object, JavaScript first looks for it on the object itself, and if it can’t find it, it looks for it on the object’s prototype, and so on up the prototype chain.

Creating Inheritance Chains

To create an inheritance chain, you can set the prototype of one object to be an instance of another object. Here’s an example:

// Parent object
function Animal(name) {
this.name = name;
}…

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Max N

A writer that writes about JavaScript and Python to beginners. If you find my articles helpful, feel free to follow.