JavaScript is a programming language which is widely used for driving dynamic behaviour on millions of websites. Nearly every website with some sort of dynamic feature(s) uses JavaScript behind the scenes to allow small (and sometimes large) programs to run right in your web-browser.

Useful Resources

If you need a few more pointers with JavaScript throughout the week, or some friendly reminders about some core concepts - then you’re obviously welcome to ask of course, but if you’d prefer, the following links could be of some use;

Mozilla Developer Network: JavaScript: The Mozilla Developer Network have an extensive but excellent set of guides for JavaScript. Ranging from beginner tutorials which can help to give you another perspective to a full reference guide for all of the functions that are available when using Arrays or Mathematics for instance.

CodeAcademy: Introduction to JavaScript: If you get completely stuck on a specific part of JavaScript, sometimes an alternative view can help to hop over the hurdle. This CodeAcademy course is broken down into convenient chunks to help out.

ECMAScript, ES-What-Now?

JavaScript started out as an addition to the Netscape Navigator web-browser as a way for websites to add additional functionality to their pages. A few years later, Microsoft created ‘JSCript’ and other browsers start to follow suit. While done with the best intentions, everyone’s implementation was a bit different which meant some scripts that worked in one browser wouldn’t work with another.

We’re still a long way from a perfect world where all scripts “just work” in every browser, but ECMAScript (or ES) is a standardized version of JavaScript and was created so that it would be easier for multiple vendors to provide their own support for JavaScript while supporting the same core language features.

Some people would say that “ECMAScript is the ‘proper name’ for Javascript. Essentially, ECMAScript now forms the core basis of what JavaScript should look like. Some browsers still add their own special functions and features that don’t work elsewhere - but the core language described by ECMAScript should be supported by all major browsers. As such, we will try to focus on these core ECMAScript features - but will continue to refer to it as ‘JavaScript’ throughout the course.

ECMAScript 6 adds a bunch of convenient features to make coding easier. We won’t focus too much on those features specifically, but where they do help us - we will make sure to highlight them as we go along.

Other Uses of JavaScript

While JavaScript rose to popularity as a web-based language, it’s popularity and flexibility as a language has meant that numerous other platforms have appeared to allow developers to use their JavaScript skills to develop a variety of applications. Many website servers / backends are now developed in NodeJS for instance, and it’s even possible to develop professional iOS applications and desktop applications (like Slack) entirely in JavaScript using frameworks like Electron.