JavaScript Summary

Pat yourself on the back — you've made it to the end of this tutorial!

This tutorial has demonstrated what JavaScript is and how it works. We started with the basics — like how to turn JavaScript on and off in your browser. We then quickly moved on to the basic syntax of JavaScript. We learned that you can include JavaScript within your HTML page, or you can place it in an external file — the choice is yours.

We learned about some of the key concepts of JavaScript and that these concepts are pretty standard across most programming/scripting languages — concepts such as operators, variables and functions.

We learned that intrinsic events enable you run a script in response to a user's action.

We covered some more of the standard programming concepts such as If statements, Switch statements and loops.

We learned how to catch an error and present a friendly message back to the user (so as to not scare them off).

Among the advanced topics were cookies, which enable us to "remember" a user by writing and reading a file on their hard drive. We learned how to present the date and time in a nice format, then we looked at arrays — another standard programming concept.

Finally, we looked at the concept of unobtrusive JavaScript and how we can be more mindful of non-JavaScript users. In particular, ensuring our application still works for non-JavaScript users.

What Next?

Here are some JavaScript examples that you can use to base your own code on.

Also check out the jQuery Tutorial. jQuery is a JavaScript framework that can make it easy to create cross-browser JavaScript applications that "just work".

Another good one is the JSON Tutorial. JSON is data interchange format that you will probably find very familiar, now that you've seen how JavaScript works.