javascript-foundations.md

Javascript Foundations

Warning: This course is long (and tough). It's 4 code school courses. But once you're done, you'll understand everything you need to know about Javascript 😄.

Outcome

You'll:

• Understand the majority of the features of the Javascript language.
• Be ready to learn how to make interactive web pages.

Prerequisites

• html and css foundations

Advice

• Javascript has versions (although Chrome, for example, tends to release them feature by feature all the time). Version ES5 is the current version, but ES6 is a lot better 😄

• The code school courses are based on ES5.

• He says semi colons are necessary and semi colons are good. They're not necessary anymore in modern javascript.

• These days we don't tend not to use while loops or for loops. We'll use arrays and a collections library instead (Like .map). You'll learn this soon.

• undefined and null are a pain. There are some libraries which help us do undefined and null checking later 😄

• Javascript (Especially ES5) has a lot of things programmers don't like / find hard. ES6 helps alot of these things.

  • Variable scope
  • When you load a .js file <script src="myScript.js" /> it just runs...
  • All global variables in any of your .js files are accessible globally, so you can access them from anywhere. (Try not to use global vars...)
  • There are ~3 ways to declare a function :(
  • Hoisting is dangerous!
  • Objects in ES5 are quite basic (and have more than one way of doing things... overlap between objects and prototypes)

• We will use arrays. But we won't use the manipulation methods much e.g. pop, push or shift. We'll use collection libraries 😄

• Some of the stuff they do in the closure section you would never do.

• ES6 offers much better syntax for doing prototypes....

• Take loop performance section with a pinch of salt. Performance is hard. If you code is slow - measure how slow it is and try and speed it up.

• We'll be learning something later to help with namespaces.

Learning materials

Core

• Javascript Road Trip Part 1
• Javascript Road Trip Part 2
• Javascript Road Trip Part 3 (Skip Hoisting and Prototypes)
• Javascript best practices (Skip the tasks for section 2, Skip all of section 4 (Namespacing))

Additional / useful

• Cheatsheet

Tasks

• Do all the code school courses and tasks above.

• Write a program which prints 'Hello World' to the console inside the chrome debugging console

• Javascript Tasks