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Introduction

This first episode will introduce you to the course, what we'll cover, the format, and the software you'll need to get started.

SlidesPDF

Tip: Press the question mark key (?) when playing the slides to see a list of keyboard shortcuts.

  1. Install these software on your computer; they’ll provide us the environment to write and run JavaScript programs.
  2. (Optional) Customise VS Code by choosing a theme, etc.
  3. Create a new JavaScript file, type code in it to display your name, and run the file.

You’ll find an “extras” section like this one in the lesson pages. This is where I’ll add some extra information (such as JavaScript peculiarities) that I left out of the slides. I strongly recommend that you read them.

I mentioned that we’d be using Node.js to run our JavaScript code. We don’t actually need Node for this; our computers already have browsers that can run JavaScript. However, I feel it would be distracting working in the browser, since we won’t be building a web app. (We may build parts of a web app though 🙃.) Also, one of the goals of this course is to learn to work in a terminal, and using Node forces us to do so.

Outside the browser, Node isn’t the only tool that can run JavaScript. There’s also Deno. It’s new, and it was created by Node’s creator, Ryan Dahl, to address some of his regrets with Node. (You can watch his initial announcement of Deno if you’re curious.) We’re choosing Node over Deno for this course because it’s more mature and better-known; Node was released in 2009, whereas Deno was released in 2018.

Computers can perform repetitive tasks much faster than us, so we’d like to delegate those tasks to them. But, we need a way to tell a computer what we want it to do. That’s where programming comes in.

To instruct a computer, we must “speak” its language, the machine language. However, the language is difficult to learn — it’s “zeroes and ones”, as they say. Over time, people have developed higher-level languages that are closer to our human languages so that it’s easier to program the computer. JavaScript is one of these “high-level languages”.

We still have to translate these languages into machine language for the computer to understand. We use programs called compilers to do this translation. (A little irony here: we don’t “compile” JavaScript when we run Node. I’ll explain why in the next extras.)

You might wonder, why don’t we just program in our human languages? The problem is that our languages are very ambiguous. The same word/phrase/clause can mean very different things depending on the context. For example, the phrase “what’s up?” can be used as a greeting, but it can also be a literal question, as in “what is above?”. Programming languages avoid this so that we get predictable results from the computer.