Learning JavaScript: Take 1.

Hello, world!

My experience with JavaScript is almost entirely composed of Angular 😅I shudder when I think back to that time. The project was one of my first assignments at work right out of college. I spent several days figuring out what was going on because the project was in Angular using ECMA 2016. There were almost no copy/paste examples with this combination of dependencies. I remember the ordeal I had getting my environment set up — every time my “liquid desktop” was restarted by Big Brother I’d lose everything. That was the last time I worked with JavaScript and I have, for the most part, tried to stay away. I am taking on JavaScript again in the hopes that a more positive learning experience can encourage me to push past the hurdles.

I got recommendations from my Twitter feed for JavaScript learning resources recently. ocean diaali mentioned rithmschool.com/courses. I had never heard of the site before. The courses are divided by experience level and so I chose to start at the beginning with the very first class to give me some quick wins.

First up was JavaScript tools. Websites like codecademy.com skip learning this part at first. I’m glad this lesson started with tools though — I fiddled with the Chrome JS console and got curious about the internals of JS. It was enough to motivate me to get through it.

After reading the course material, going through all supplementary sources, and doing all exercises, I feel good about the time spent. The lesson was interactive and the exercises helped me discover new supporting information on the subject. Above all, I am motivated to continue learning JavaScript!

Exercises

1. What is the difference between JavaScript and ECMAScript?
   ECMAScript is a standard. JavaScript is an implementation of that standard.

2. Who is Brendan Eich?
   Brendan Eich is the creator of JavaScript.

3. How do you hide and show the Chrome console?
   To open up the console press Option + Command + j on a Mac (or Control + Shift + J on Windows and Linux). Another way to get to the console is to right click on the web page, select Inspect, and then move to the tab called Console. To hide the console, press on the X icon on the upper right hand side of the console.

4. Create a simple page with a script tag. Inside of the script tag declare a couple of variables and then log their values to the console.
   Check out my answer here:

5. Research prompt and confirm - what do they do?
   prompt displays a dialog with an optional message prompting the user to input some text. confirm displays a modal dialog with an optional message and two buttons, OK and Cancel.

Cross-posted on Medium.