JavaScript: Just the Basics - A Primer for the Complete Beginner [Format Kindle]

JavaScript has become one of the most ubiquitous and important computer languages. It's now used not only for adding active behavior to web pages, but also for writing applications for web servers, mobile devices, and even the computer desktop. Despite its popularity, however, JavaScript isn't easy to learn or to understand. JavaScript isn't simply "Java Lite." Rather, it's a highly unique, subtle, flexible, quirky, hazardous, full-featured, and fascinating computer language.

I wrote this book to simplify JavaScript, to teach the basics of the language clearly and quickly so that you can begin working with it as soon as possible. The other JavaScript books I've read are either way too long for the beginner, or seem to have other primary agendas such as critiquing the language or teaching programming principles. This book is for the webmaster, the web programmer, or the web designer who wants to learn JavaScript NOW.

No matter how far you plan to delve into JavaScript in the future, this book will provide the FIRST STEP. It certainly doesn't include all the details of this complex language. It doesn't duplicate the free online JavaScript documentation, but rather is meant to be used in conjunction with it and includes many documentation links. It focuses on basic and practical techniques, and avoids advanced, redundant, and less useful ones. It emphasizes legacy features that are supported consistently by all modern browsers, and skirts browser-dependent features as well as new features that are still under development. But to keep things interesting and to offer a vision of the possibilities, it does include a number of demonstrations to introduce you to more advanced JavaScript technologies, such as animations, cookies, and Ajax.

I think that you'll find "JavaScript: Just the Basics" to be a highly readable tutorial, which you can enjoy from beginning to end, and that you'll take away a good basic understanding of the language and how to use it.

This book was conceived, designed, written, and formatted as a digital-only book. I've carefully prepared the manuscript so that the source code listings, tables, and figures are easy to read, and the book is simple to navigate. The book does not include a traditional index. For most ebooks, indexes are awkward and slow. Plan to use your ebook reader's much more powerful Search feature instead.

The book is approximately 50,000 words in length. I've provided a companion website, where you can download the book's example source code and find other resources.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part I. The Core JavaScript Language
Chapter 1. Variables and Values
Chapter 2. Expressions and Operators
Chapter 3. Flow Control
Chapter 4. Objects and Arrays
Chapter 5. Defining Functions and Methods
Chapter 6. Constructors and Inheritance
Chapter 7. Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions

Part II. Client-Side JavaScript: Adding Dynamic Behavior to Web Pages
Chapter 8. Running JavaScript in the Browser
Chapter 9. Scripting Browser Windows
Chapter 10. Scripting Web-Page Content
Chapter 11. Scripting Web-Page Styles
Chapter 12. Handling Web-Page Events

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Michael J Young has a master's degree in computer science and is the author of 27 books on computing. His book "XML Step by Step" won the top award, "Distinguished Technical Communication," in the 2000-2001 International Technical Publications Competition of the Society for Technical Communication. "JavaScript: Just the Basics" is his first self-published digital book. He hand codes his websites in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and MySQL.