Skip to Content
Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition
book

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

by Matthew MacDonald
June 2015
Beginner
620 pages
18h 6m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 4th Edition

Chapter 14. JavaScript: Adding Interactivity

JavaScript is a simplified programming language designed to beef up web pages with interactive features. It gives you just enough programming muscle to add some fancy effects, but not enough to cause serious damage to your site if your code goes wonky. JavaScript is perfect for creating pop-up windows, embedding animated effects, and modifying the content on your web page. On the other hand, it can’t help you build a hot ecommerce storefront; for that, you need the PayPal tools described in Chapter 13 or a server-side programming platform (see Server-Side and Client-Side Programming).

The goal of this chapter isn’t to teach you the details of JavaScript programming—it’s to give you enough background so you can find great free JavaScript code online, understand it well enough to make basic changes, and then paste it into your pages to get the results you want.

Note

In fact, you’ve already used JavaScript (perhaps unwittingly) in some of the examples in this book. You used it to track visitors to your site with Google Analytics (Understanding Google Analytics), to fetch a suitable block of ads for your AdSense-enabled web page (Placing Ads in Your Web Pages), and to grab a list of your recent tweets to show on your site (Sharing Your Tweets on Your Site). In all these cases, you used a block of ready-made JavaScript code (or a reference to a ready-made JavaScript file). You got the benefits of JavaScript interactivity without needing to write ...

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,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’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.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI 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.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’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.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'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.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Creating a Website: The Missing Manual, 3rd Edition

Matthew MacDonald
Web Site Cookbook

Web Site Cookbook

Doug Addison

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449374525Errata Page