JavaScript Syllabus

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Programming

The plan for this class is to spend the first session looking at the basics of JavaScript and the second session deciphering and building on a pre-written JavaScript that you can use to validate the user entry of your online forms. Before you begin your work in this class, go to My Documents on your computer and create a folder with your name. You will be saving all your work in this folder.

What is JavaScript?
JavaScript is a "client-side" programming language. Client-side means that the program code goes into your computer with the rest of the web page code (usually HTML), and your browser reads the code and does what it says. JavaScript can do more than HTML. Really old browsers can't read JavaScript, or they can only read limited amounts of JavaScript. A browser that is JavaScript enabled can read some version of JavaScript.

JavaScript doesn't have any thing to do with the Java programming language, even though their names are similar. Click here for a page with a Java program. JavaScript can't do any fancy graphic work like Java can. Instead, we use JavaScript to enhance the functionality of a web page. For example, we will use JavaScript to validate forms.

There are other types of scripting that look a lot like JavaScript. Some of them work with JavaScript on the server-side. That means that the server holds the programming instead of sending it to the browser to figure out.

Programming Exercises

• Exercise One: an alert box
• Exercise Two: variables
• Exercise Three: outputting to the screen
• Exercise Four: gathering information from a form
• Exercise Five: securing your form

More Complicated JavaScript

• Page
• Code