jQuery for Designers Beginner's Guide

Designer, meet JavaScript

JavaScript is a powerful and complex language—you can work with it for 10 years and still have more to learn. But don't let that frighten you away, you don't have to know everything about it to be able to take advantage of what it has to offer. In fact, you just have to get down a few basics.

This section introduces some JavaScript basics and JavaScript syntax. Don't be scared away by that developer word—syntax. Syntax just means the rules for writing a language, much like we have rules of grammar for writing English.

Variables

Let's start with something simple:

var x = 5;

This is a sentence in JavaScript. In English, we end a sentence with a period or maybe a question mark or exclamation point. In JavaScript we end our sentences ...