July 2008
Beginner
543 pages
17h 59m
English
Content preview from JavaScript: The Missing ManualBecome 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 1. Writing Your First JavaScript Program
By itself, HTML doesn’t have any smarts: It can’t do math, it can’t figure out if someone has correctly filled out a form, and it can’t make decisions based on how a Web visitor interacts with it. Basically, HTML lets people read text, look at pictures, and click links to move to other Web pages with more text and pictures. In order to add intelligence to your Web pages so they can respond to your site’s visitors, you need JavaScript.
JavaScript lets a Web page react intelligently. With it, you can create smart Web forms that let visitors know when they’ve forgotten to include necessary information; you can make elements appear, disappear, or move around a Web page (see Figure 1-1); you can even update the contents of a Web page with information retrieved from a Web server—without having to load a new Web page. In short, JavaScript lets you make your Web sites more engaging and effective.
Introducing Programming
For a lot of people, the word “computer programming” conjures up visions of super-intelligent nerds hunched over keyboards, typing nearly unintelligible gibberish for hours on end. And, honestly, some programming is just like that. Programming can seem like complex magic that’s well beyond the average mortal. But many programming concepts aren’t difficult to grasp, and as programming languages go, JavaScript is relatively friendly to nonprogrammers.
Figure 1-1. JavaScript lets Web pages respond to visitors. On Amazon.com, mousing ...
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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.
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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.