Programming - Building JavaScript Games for Phones, Tablets, and Desktop - page 2

Chapter 1
Programming
This chapter talks about how programming languages have evolved over time. Since the rise of the
Internet in the 1990s, a lot of languages and tools have been developed to support it. One of the
best-known languages is HTML, which is used to create web sites. Together with JavaScript and
CSS style sheets, it allows the creation of dynamic web sites that can be displayed by a browser.
I discuss HTML and JavaScript in detail in this chapter, and you see how to create a simple web
application that uses the HTML5 canvas in combination with JavaScript.
Computers and Programs
Before you start dealing with HTML and JavaScript, this section briefly covers computers and
programming in general. After that, you move on to how to create a simple HTML page in
combination with JavaScript.
Processor and Memory
Generally speaking, a computer consists of a processor and memory . This is true for all modern
computers, including game consoles, smartphones, and tablets. I define memory as something
that you can read things from, and/or write things to . Memory comes in different varieties, mainly
differing in the speed of data transfer and data access. Some memory can be read and written as
many times as you want, some memory can only be read, and other memory can only be written to.
The main processor in the computer is called the central processing unit (CPU) . The most common
other processor on a computer is a graphics processing unit (GPU) . Even the CPU itself nowadays is
no longer a single processor but often consists of a number of cores.
Input and output equipment, such as a mouse, gamepad, keyboard, monitor, printer, touch screen,
and so on, seems to fall outside the processor and memory categories at first glance. However,
abstractly speaking, they're actually memory. A touch screen is read-only memory, and a printer is
write-only memory.
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