December 2009
Beginner
860 pages
19h 42m
English
Content preview from Beginning HTML, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript®Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 11. Learning JavaScript
There are many programming languages in existence today, and in this chapter, you will begin learning the basics of a programming language called JavaScript, which is by far the most common programming language used in web pages.
Although it is not possible to teach you everything there is to learn about JavaScript in one or two chapters, there are thousands of free scripts available on the Web that you can use. Therefore, the aim of this chapter is to teach you enough to start using these scripts in your web pages and to understand how they work. You should even be able to customize these scripts and write some basic scripts of your own based upon what you will learn in this and the following chapter. In addition, it will serve as a good introduction to general programming concepts.
Once you have covered the basics of JavaScript in this chapter, Chapter 12 will show you lots of examples that should both act as a library of helpful scripts you can use in your own pages and also clarify how the basic concepts you learned in this chapter work in practice.
As you will see, JavaScript gives web developers a programming language to use in web pages that allows them to perform tasks such as the following:
Read elements from documents and write new elements and text into documents
Manipulate or move text
Perform mathematical calculations on data
React to events, such as a user clicking a button
Retrieve the current date and time from a user's computer or the last ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.