Welcome to JavaScript: A Beginner’s Guide, Third Edition! Years ago, I was surfing the Web and noticed that people were publishing pages about themselves and calling them homepages. After viewing a number of these, I decided to create a homepage myself. I had no idea where to begin but, through trial and error, I figured out how to code HTML and publish my documents on a Web server. Over time, I saw some interesting effects used on other homepages (like alert messages that popped up out of nowhere or images that would magically change when I moved my mouse over them). I was curious and just had to know what was being done to create those effects. Were these page creators using HTML tags I did not know about?

Eventually, one site revealed what they were using to create those effects: JavaScript. I went in search of information on it, and came across a few tutorials and scripts on the Web. Since I had programmed in other languages (such as a relatively obscure language called Ada), I was able to catch on to JavaScript fairly quickly by looking at these tutorials and scripts.

I learned enough that I decided to create a Web site that would teach HTML and JavaScript to beginners. As soon as I began the project, I received questions from visitors that were way over my head—forcing me to dig deeper and learn more about JavaScript. As a result, I became completely familiar with this scripting language and what it can do. Not only can you add fun effects to a Web page, you can create scripts that will perform useful tasks, like validate form input, add navigational elements to documents, or react to user events.

The goal of this book is to help you to learn the basics of the JavaScript language with as little hair pulling and monitor smashing as possible. You do not need any prior programming experience to learn JavaScript from this book. All you need is knowledge of HTML and/or XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and how to use your favorite text editor and Web browser (see Chapter 1 for more information).