HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
JavaScript Fundamentals
This section will provide an in-depth overview of JavaScript, including its strengths and
weaknesses. The intention of this chapter is to provide you a strong understanding of
JavaScript fundamentals, and to focus on how the language
should
be used, rather than how
it
can
be used.
JavaScript is a particularly flexible language, and does not enforce much discipline or struc-
ture on its users. In addition, JavaScript contains a number of features than can only truly be
regarded as bugs. These remain in the language principally due to backwards compatibility
concerns.
In order to write large-scale web applications it is necessary to harness the strengths of
JavaScript, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls that can easily confront software
engineers and programmers who do not understand the language fundamentals, and do not
structure their applications in a manner compatible with the growth of the code base.
As mentioned in the introduction, this chapter will not act as a tutorial on the syntax of
JavaScript (such as loops and branching), although anyone familiar with languages utilizing
similar syntax (C, C++, Java etc.), will quickly pick up those details from the examples be-
low.
In order to follow the examples in this topic, simply open the Chrome or Firefox console,
and enter the commands directly (as demonstrated earlier in the topic).
