Learning JavaScript, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1. Your First Application

Often, the best way to learn is to do: so we’re going to start off by creating a simple application. The point of this chapter is not to explain everything that’s going on: there’s a lot that’s going to be unfamiliar and confusing, and my advice to you is to relax and not get caught up in trying to understand everything right now. The point of this chapter is to get you excited. Just enjoy the ride; by the time you finish this book, everything in this chapter will make perfect sense to you.

Tip

If you don’t have much programming experience, one of the things that is going to cause you a lot of frustration at first is how literal computers are. Our human minds can deal with confusing input very easily, but computers are terrible at this. If I make a grammatical error, it may change your opinion about my writing ability, but you will probably still understand me. JavaScript—like all programming languages—has no such facility to deal with confusing input. Capitalization, spelling, and the order of words and punctuation are crucial. If you’re experiencing problems, make sure you’ve copied everything correctly: you haven’t substituted semicolons for colons or commas for periods, you haven’t mixed single quotation and double quotation marks, and you’ve capitalized all of your code correctly. Once you’ve had some experience, you’ll learn where you can “do things your way,” and where you have to be perfectly literal, but for now, you will experience less ...