JavaScript: Beginners Guide to Web Development
JavaScript or we all know as JS is the most popular and flexible scripting language, appropriate for your dream website. If you have read our previous articles (if not, please check out our article), you would have seen this language common in the lists. It is the most in-demand and efficient language to learn for a successful career in the information technology domain. This language can be a huge help to you, in the creation of your codes, web development, games, etc.
If we have gained your interest in JS, then get prepared to be more impressed with its features. Released in 1995, this 25-year-old language has revolutionized the Web development domain. JavaScript is an object-based scripting language that is lightweight and cross-platform. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm, single-threaded, dynamic language, imperative, and declarative (e.g. functional programming) style. JavaScript is a translated language where the JavaScript Translator (embedded in the browser) translates the JavaScript code for the web browser. With JavaScript, you can build dynamic web applications for a better user experience. Not only web browsers but databases such as CouchDB and MongoDB use JS as their scripting and query language.
JavaScript follows the syntax and structure of the C programming language. So if you have prior knowledge of HTML and object-oriented programming, it can help you to learn the language quickly.
JS uses prototypes rather than using classes for inheritance. It is a case-sensitive language. JavaScript is portable in several operating systems like Windows, macOS, etc.
A few of its applications are:
- It is used to create interactive websites.
- It helps in client-side validation.
- You can create dynamic drop-down menus.
- Features like display of date, time and clocks can be used.
- Displaying popup windows and dialog boxes (like an alert dialog box, confirm dialog box and prompt dialog box) can highlight your website.
Just like HTML, JS also uses angular brackets (“<>”) for scripting code which are called tags, mentioned in the example:
The script tag in the above example takes two important attributes:
- Language: This attribute specifies what scripting language you are using, which in our case will be javascript.
- Type: This attribute indicates the scripting language in use and what value we need to set. In our case, it will be “text/javascript”.
Taking into consideration the script tag, let’s see a conventional code for Hello World in JS. It will give you a gist of the syntax.
Its output will be:
Breaking down this code, we can see:
- The <html>, <body>, these are HTML to save our code from a browser that does not support JavaScript.
- The <script> tag as discussed earlier id to specify the language and type used for the webpage
- This “//–>” signifies a comment in JavaScript,
- So we add it to prevent a browser from reading the end of the HTML comment as a piece of JavaScript code.
- Now our main code resides in this function “write” which is called to write a string into our HTML document. This function can be used to write text, HTML, or both.
After going through these features and syntax, you will have a basic understanding of what JavaScript is used for. There are plenty of documents and tutorials available for you to start learning this language.
In addition, you can visit https://www.javascript.com/
The specification for JavaScript 2.0 can be found on the following site: http://www.ecmascript.org/
In Conclusion, We hope this article was of some help to you and it attracted you to begin your expedition in JS scripting and develop your dream website.
Happy Coding…
READ MORE: 5 Programming Languages for Beginners
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Very nice,
Thanks for sharing
Regards.
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