Destructuring an object

Given an object, you can extract just some values and put them into named variables:

const person = {
  firstName: 'Tom',
  lastName: 'Cruise',
  actor: true,
  age: 54, //made up
}

const {firstName: name, age} = person

name and age contain the desired values.

The syntax also works on arrays:

const a = [1,2,3,4,5]
const [first, second] = a

This statement creates 3 new variables by getting the items with index 0, 1, 4 from the array a:

const [first, second, , , fifth] = a