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In our first JavaScript module, we first answer some fundamental questions such as “what is JavaScript?”, “what does it look like?”, and “what can it do?”, before moving on to taking you through your first practical experience of writing JavaScript. After that, we discuss some key JavaScript features in detail, such as variables, strings, numbers and arrays.
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In this module, we continue our coverage of all JavaScript’s key fundamental features, turning our attention to commonly-encountered types of code block such as conditional statements, loops, functions, and events. You’ve seen this stuff already in the course, but only in passing — here we’ll discuss it all explicitly.
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In JavaScript, most things are objects, from core JavaScript features like strings and arrays to the browser APIs built on top of JavaScript. You can even create your own objects to encapsulate related functions and variables into efficient packages. The object-oriented nature of JavaScript is important to understand if you want to go further with your knowledge of the language and write more efficient code, therefore we’ve provided this module to help you. Here we teach object theory and syntax in detail, look at how to create your own objects, and explain what JSON data is and how to work with it.
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In this module we take a look at asynchronous JavaScript, why it is important, and how it can be used to effectively handle potential blocking operations such as fetching resources from a server.
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When writing client-side JavaScript for web sites or applications, you won’t go very far before you start to use APIs — interfaces for manipulating different aspects of the browser and operating system the site is running on, or even data from other web sites or services. In this module we will explore what APIs are, and how to use some of the most common APIs you’ll come across often in your development work.
The features we teach in this course are stable and have been supported by all major browsers for several years.
We think that the features added to JavaScript in ECMAScript 2015 and subsequent versions enable developers to write more readable, reliable, and expressive code, and that it’s important to learn about them.
JavaScript is an actively evolving language and has changed greatly over the years. In particular, the 6th edition of the language (sometimes known as ECMAScript 2015 or ES6), introduced in 2015, added many new features. At the same time, to maintain backwards compatibility with older websites, old features of the language have been retained, even when they are no longer considered good practice.
This topic contains the following modules, in a suggested order for working through them.
