Chapter 4. Making sense of JavaScript

Grasp the subject, the words will follow.

Cato, the Elder

JavaScript is probably a language with nine (or even more) lives. JavaScript made its official debut in 1996 as part of the Netscape browser and happily survived the first 15 years of the Internet era. It was originally supposed to be a simple language targeted at web authors willing to make their HTML pages more responsive and attractive. JavaScript was never designed to be a full-fledged programming language, but rather something that was easy to work with.

And in the end it worked very well.

JavaScript has a remarkably low barrier to entry and it is flexible enough to enable experts to do nearly anything with it. Today, knowing JavaScript is a critical ...

Get Start Here! Build Windows 8 Apps with HTML5 and JavaScript now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.