Do you need to know Javascript ?

Do you need to know Javascript ?

JavaScript

Web site maintenance or development has led to the need for software developers to know and understand how to write or read JavaScript.  The need for professional JavaScript developers is growing at a fast rate.  Now that does not mean there will be college courses dealing with JavaScript 101 but there is a vast amount of on-line knowledge areas for self taught on how to use JavaScript.

The beauty of JavaScript is that you do not need a degree where it is a free technology that requires no installation and no configuration.  You can easily open up a HTML page and quickly write a function to send out the famous “Hello World!”

Hello World Sample

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>

<body>

<p>Simple JavaScript</p>

<script>
alert( ‘Hello, world!’ );
</script>

<p>Not hard ?</p>

</body>

</html>

As displayed above, the code shows the necessary tags to create a nicely formatted HTML page which will open an alert window to display ‘Hello World’.

Advantages of learning JavaScript

A major advantage to JavaScript is the fact that it is not strictly an interactive programming language but it is platform-independent.  This means you can write the code and insert it on any machine, Android, iOS, iMac, Windows, etc.  The next important thing to take into account is that it is case sensitive which the function HelloWorld is not the same as helloworld. Be very careful about this.

The final advantage of JavaScript is the event loop. When an event is triggered in the browser, JavaScript run-time stores information in the message queue. If a callback function existed with this stored information, it will be executed the next time it is encountered within the loop. The end result is that the application is able to handle multiple operations on a single thread, which grants the developer freedom from additional programming of all the different application states.

To wrap up, it is your best interest to learn JavaScript at least to a very basic level.   It is extremely easy to pick up and use in less than an hour and finally you can not go wrong with mastering JavaScript.