About this Book
Get Programming with JavaScript is a book for beginners, for those with no programming experience. It makes extensive use of online code listings on the JS Bin website, a sandbox where you can experiment with the code and see the results instantly. There’s no setup or installation required; if you’ve got internet access, you can just get programming straight away. If you don’t have internet access, don’t worry, the printed listings include helpful annotations, and all the ideas are explained in the text.
In addition to shorter examples to illustrate the concepts covered, there is an ongoing example—a text-based adventure game called The Crypt—that you build as you progress through the book.
If you are happy working with computers, using a variety of applications, and saving and organizing your files but haven’t written programs before and would like to learn how, then this book is for you. It doesn’t try to cover all of JavaScript, or even all parts of JavaScript; it helps you to get programming with lots of practical examples and exercises that encourage you to think and explore. If you’re already a programmer and are looking for a complete JavaScript reference, then move along. But if you want a patient introduction to the language, then it’s worth sticking around; a strong understanding of the basics will make it much easier to access some of the other excellent books for programmers.