JavaScript First Steps

Answers some fundamental questions such as “what is JavaScript?”, “what does it look like?”, and “what can it do?”, along with discussing key JavaScript features such as variables, strings, numbers, and arrays.

Guides

What is JavaScript?

In this first article we will look at JavaScript from a high level, answering questions such as “what is it?”, and “what is it doing?”, and making sure you are comfortable with JavaScript’s purpose.

A first splash into JavaScript

Now you’ve learned something about the theory of JavaScript, and what you can do with it, we are going to give you a crash course in the basic features of JavaScript via a completely practical tutorial. Here you’ll build up a simple “Guess the number” game, step by step.

Storing the information you need — Variables

After reading the last couple of articles you should now know what JavaScript is, what it can do for you, how you use it alongside other web technologies, and what its main features look like from a high level. In this article we will get down to the real basics, looking at how to work with the most basic building blocks of JavaScript — Variables.

Basic math in JavaScript — numbers and operators

At this point in the course we discuss maths in JavaScript — how we can combine operators and other features to successfully manipulate numbers to do our bidding.

Handling text — strings in JavaScript

Next we’ll turn our attention to strings — this is what pieces of text are called in programming. In this article we’ll look at all the common things that you really ought to know about strings when learning JavaScript, such as creating strings, escaping quotes in string, and joining them together.

Useful string methods

Now we’ve looked at the very basics of strings, let’s move up a gear and start thinking about what useful operations we can do on strings with built-in methods, such as finding the length of a text string, joining and splitting strings, substituting one character in a string for another, and more.

Arrays

In the final article of this module, we’ll look at arrays — a neat way of storing a list of data items under a single variable name. Here we look at why this is useful, then explore how to create an array, retrieve, add, and remove items stored in an array, and more besides.

Assessments

The following assessment will test your understanding of the JavaScript basics covered in the guides above.

Silly story generator

In this assessment you’ll be tasked with taking some of the knowledge you’ve picked up in this module’s articles and applying it to creating a fun app that generates random silly stories. Have fun!