JavaScript
Primer
Basic Introduction of JavaScript
JavaScript History
• Why (re)introduce JavaScript?
o Notorious for being world’s most misunderstood programming language
(Douglas Crockford - [Link]
o Scripting language of the World Wide Web
o A very nice dynamic object-oriented general purpose programming
language
o Java- prefix suggests that JavaScript is somehow related to Java
o ECMAScript 3 – first stable version of JavaScript standard (1999) and has
remained stable ever since.
o We will use ECMAScript 5 (2009) and not ECMAScript 6 (June, 2015)
o Unlike most programming languages, the JavaScript language has no
concept of input or output.
o Browser is most common host environment
o JavaScript interpreters found elsewhere – Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop,
SVG images, Yahoo’s widget engine, server-side environments as [Link]
JavaScript Overview
• Lisp in C’s clothing
o C-like syntax, including curly braces and clunky for statement makes it look like
an ordinary procedural language
o JavaScript has more in common with functional languages like Lisp and
Scheme:
o It has arrays instead of lists, and objects instead of property lists, BUT
o Functions are first class objects; it has closures; You get lambdas without having
to balance all those parens
• Object-Oriented
o It has objects which can contain data and methods that act upon that data
o Objects can contain other objects
o It does not have classes, but it does have constructors which do what classes
do
o It does not have class-oriented inheritance, but it does have prototype-
oriented inheritance.
o Private members: - [Link]
Brief Overview
• Language with
o Types, operators, standard built-in objects, and methods
o Building blocks of the language: the types
o JavaScript programs manipulate values, which belong to a type
q Number
q String
q Boolean
q Object (Function, Array, Date, RegExp)
q null
q undefined
Numbers
• Numbers in JavaScript are double-precision 64-bit
format IEEE 754 values
• No such thing as integer in JavaScript
• Arithmetic operators are supported.
• Built-in object called Math, provides advanced
mathematical functionality
• parseInt() and parseFloat() functions convert from
string to integer or floating point, respectively
• NaN, isNaN(), isFinite() are available
String
• Strings in JavaScript are sequences of Unicode
characters
o Each character is represented by a 16-bit number
o String is a primitive type in JavaScript
o Strings are immutable and are passed by value.
o Strings have length property
o Strings can be used like objects—they have methods that allow you to
manipulate the string and access information about the string.
o List of string methods: [Link]
> var str = new String(”new string");
> str;
> [Link] = ”new property value”;
> str;
Boolean Type
• JavaScript has a boolean type—possible values are
true and false.
o true and false are both keywords
o Any value can be converted to a boolean according to these rules:
• false, 0, empty string (“”), NaN, null, undefined all become false or
falsy
• All other values become true or truthy
o Boolean operations such as && (logical and), || (logical or),
and ! (logical not) are supported.
• Comparisons
o Comparisons in JavaScript can be made using <, >, <= and >=.
These work for both strings and numbers.
o 123 == "123"; // true
o 1 == true; // true Does type coercion
o 123 === "123"; // false
Avoids type
o 1 === true; // false
coercion
Control Structures
• if (condition 1){
…
} else if (condition 2) {
…
} else {
…
} statements as in languages with C-like syntax
• while(condition){ … } loops as in
• do{ … }while(condition) loops
• for (init; condition; increment){ … } loops
• && and || use short circuit evaluation
• switch statement for numbers and strings
Objects
• JavaScript objects can be thought of as simple
collections of name-value pairs.
o As such, they are similar to:
• Dictionaries in Python.
• Hashes in Perl and Ruby.
• Hash tables in C and C++.
• HashMaps in Java.
• Associative arrays in PHP.
o The "name" part is a JavaScript string, while the value can be any
JavaScript value — including more objects.
o Creating Objects
var obj1 = new Object(); // create an empty object with new operator
var obj 2= {}; // use object literal notation
Object Prototype
• An object from which other objects inherit their
properties and methods
• All built-in JavaScript objects inherit from the
[Link]
• Standard way to create an object prototype is to
use an object constructor function
function Person(name, age) {
[Link] = name;
[Link] = age;
}
// Define an object
var You = new Person("You", 24);
// We are creating a new person named "You"
// (that was the first parameter, and the age..)
Resources
• [Link]
US/docs/Web/JavaScript/A_re-introduction_to_JavaScript
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
• [Link]
