Chapter 1
An Overview of JavaScript
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding programming in general, and JavaScript in particular
Getting a taste of what you can (and can’t) do with JavaScript
Learning the tools you need to get coding
Adding JavaScript code to a web page
Storing your code in a separate JavaScript file
What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.
— ALAN PERLIS
When we talk about web coding, what we’re really talking about is JavaScript. Yep, you need HTML and CSS to create a web page, and you need tools such as PHP and MySQL to convince a web server to give your page some data, but the glue — and sometimes the duct tape — that binds all these technologies together is JavaScript. The result is that JavaScript is now (and has been for a while) the default programming language for web development. If you want to control a page using code (and I know you do), then ...
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