HTML5, JavaScript, and jQuery 24-Hour Trainer

Lesson 11

JavaScript

JavaScript has been around almost as long as web browsers themselves. It first appeared in 1995 with Netscape Navigator 2.0 and is the only programming language supported by all the most popular browsers. As a result, if you want to build dynamic websites, you need to know JavaScript.

For a long time, JavaScript was dismissed as a second-rate language, only appropriate for implementing basic functionality such as field validation. In the last five years, JavaScript's reputation has improved dramatically. This happened partly as a result of the massive performance increases that have occurred with JavaScript engines, beginning in Chrome and rippling out to all the other major browsers. More important, however, programmers began to re-evaluate the language itself and learned to harness its power.

Although JavaScript contains more than its fair share of idiosyncrasies, and although the designers of the language made some unusual decisions, JavaScript turns out to be a powerful and flexible language when it is used correctly. The goal of the next few lessons is to not only introduce the language, but also to offer some advice on how you should use the language if you want to write large and complex web applications.

This lesson will provide a quick introduction to the data types and syntax of JavaScript. These aspects of the language are reasonably conventional and are easy to pick up for anyone with a background in other programming languages.

JavaScript ...