Summary

In this brief introduction to JavaScript you should have a feel for what JavaScript is and what it can do. In particular this chapter covered the following:

• We looked into the process the browser follows when interpreting our web page. It goes though the page element by element (parsing), and acts upon our HTML tags and JavaScript code as it comes to it.

• When developing for the web using JavaScript, there are two places where we can choose our code to be executed: server-side or client-side. Client-side is essentially the side on which the browser is running—the user's machine. Server-side refers to any processing or storage done on the web server itself.

• Unlike many programming languages, JavaScript requires just a text editor to start creating code. Something like Windows NotePad is fine for getting started, though more extensive tools will prove valuable once you get more experienced.

• JavaScript code is embedded into the web page itself along with the HTML. Its existence is marked out by the use of <script> tags. As with HTML, script executes from the top of the page and works down to the bottom, interpreting and executing the code statement by statement as it's reached.

• We introduced the online trivia quiz, which is the case study that we'll be building over the course of the book. We took a look at some of the design ideas behind the trivia quiz's coding, and explained how the functionality of the quiz is built up over the course of the book.