Rob Miles - Begin to Code with JavaScript

Formatting parts of a document using

Programming is the most creative thing you can learn how to do. Why? If you learn to paint, you can create pictures. If you learn to play the violin, you can make music, but if you learn to program, you can create entirely new experiences (and you can make pictures and music, too, if you want). Once youve started on the programming path, theres no limit to where you can go. There are always new devices, technologies, and marketplaces where you can use your programming skills.

Think of this book as your first step on a journey to programming enlightenment. The best journeys are undertaken with a destination in mind, and the destination of this journey is usefulness. By the end of this book, you will have the skills and knowledge to write useful programs and make them available to anyone in the world.

But first, a word of warning: I would not say that learning to write programs is easy. This is for two reasons:

If I tell you that its easy, and you still cant do it, you might feel bad about this (and rather cross with me).

If I tell you its easy and you manage to do it, you might think that it isnt worth doing.

Learning to program is not easy. Its a kind of difficult that you might not have seen before. Programming is all about detail and sequencing. You must learn how the computer does things and how to express what you want it to do.

Imagine that you were lucky enough to be able to afford your own personal chef. At the start, you would have to explain things like, If it is sunny outside, I like orange juice and a grapefruit for breakfast, but if it is raining, Id like a bowl of porridge and a big mug of coffee. Occasionally, your chef would make mistakes. Perhaps you would get a black coffee rather than the latte that you wanted. However, over time, you would add more detail to your instructions until your chef knew exactly what to do.

A computer is like a chef who doesnt even know how to cook. Rather than saying make me a coffee, you would have to say, Take the brown powder from the coffee bag and add it to hot water. Then you would have to explain how to make hot water and how you must be careful with the kettle and so on. This is hard work.

It turns out that the key to success as a programmer is much the same as for many other endeavors. To become a world-renowned violin player, you will have to practice a lot. The same is true for programming. You must spend a lot of time working on your programs to acquire code-writing skills. However, the good news is that just as a violin player really enjoys making the instrument sing, making a computer do exactly what you want turns out to be a very rewarding experience. It gets even more enjoyable when you see other people using programs that youve written and finding them useful and fun to use.

Ive organized this book in three parts. Each part builds on the previous one with the aim of turning you into a successful programmer. We start off discovering the environment in which JavaScript programs run. Then we learn the fundamentals of programming and we finish by making some properly useful (and fun) programs.

The first part gets you started. Youll discover the environment in which JavaScript programs run and learn how to create web pages containing JavaScript programs.