JavaScript: Novice to Ninja

Chapter 2Programming Basics

In the last chapter, we introduced JavaScript and set up a programming environment where we got our hands dirty with a few JavaScript programs. In this chapter, we’re going to delve further to learn how JavaScript works, and start writing some programs.

We’ll cover the following topics:

• the importance of well-commented code

• JavaScript grammar―expressions, statements, semicolons, and whitespace

• primitive data types

• strings―string literals and string methods such as length

• variables―declaring and assigning

• numbers―decimal, hexadecimal, octal and exponent form, Infinity, and NaN

• arithmetic operations such as +, -, *, /, and %

• undefined and null

• Booleans―truthy and falsy values

• logical operators―AND, OR, and ...