Chapter 1 What Is JavaScript to a Programmer?

In the beginning, there were Assembly and compiled languages. Later came scripting languages such as sed, awk, and Perl, which many programmers used to perform a variety of tasks. Followed by, in the late 80s and early 90s, the Internet, which exploded into a technological revolution that allowed anyone with a modem to communicate and retrieve information from around the world. As the Internet grew in number of users, it was obvious that an increase in functionality was needed in the browsers and the data they were rendering.

HTML, even with its advantages, was falling short of providing the control many developers wanted when creating Web pages and applications. This prompted the use of server-side ...

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