JavaScript For Kids For Dummies

Chapter 1

Programming the Web

JavaScript is a powerful language that’s easy to learn! In this chapter, we explain the basics of programming, tell you what JavaScript is, and get you started with writing your first JavaScript commands.

One of the most important parts of starting any new project is to make sure you have your workshop stocked with all the correct tools. In this chapter, you install and configure all the programs you need and start experimenting with some real JavaScript programs!

What Is Programming?

A computer program is a series of instructions that can be understood and followed by a computer. Computer programming, also known as coding, is what we call it when we write these instructions. Computers can’t do things on their own. They need a computer program to tell them what to do. Computer programmers write code to make computers do all sort of things.

The women who invented programming

Electronic computers as we know them were first invented in the 1930s. But it was the middle of the 1800s when the first computer program — a set of instructions designed to be carried out by a machine — was written.

The author of the first computer program — and, therefore, the world’s first computer programmer — was a woman named Ada Lovelace. A mathematician in England, she was the first person to envision computers that could do much more than just crunch numbers. She ...