JavaScript Course

Part 2 - From the ground up

If you have jumped into the course at this page and have not seen Part 1 it would be a good idea to have a quick look through that before proceeding.

Link to Part 1

At least don't miss the principles page at the end of Part 1.

In Part 1 of this course you would have seen several examples showing what it is possible to do in JavaScript and you should have picked up a smattering of the language. To use it effectively you should really study the grammar more systematically and that is the subject of this part of the course.

Part 2 is based on material that has been delivered in classroom courses lasting 3 days each in a professional environment. The content has been brought up to date, particularly to ensure it is compatible with HTML5.

It will be divided up into sub-sections:

The core language.
Javascript is used in many different environments, not necessarily web based. This part of the course covers the language itself, common to all environments. The standard we will be using is ECMAScript Version 5, the full specification of which can be found here. (It was noted in Part 1 that ECMAScript and JavaScript are synonyms.)
Javascript with HTML.
This is about Javascript running in a web browser to manipulate items on a web page which acts as the interface with the user. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has standardised the Document Object Model (DOM) representing page structure.

So let us begin...

When you come to the exercises:

Since I first wrote this course most browsers have adopted what is known as the Console API. It has several useful functions you can use for debugging and testing. For example


  console.log (x);

where x is any of the variables in your code, enables you to see full details of the variable in the browser's console.

Other particularly useful functions are console.debug () and console.assert () but there are several others. For details see Mozilla's reference page about the Console.

Learn to program with JavaScript (in HTML5)

Start again - properly

Part 2 - From the ground up

When you come to the exercises: