Overview

A Survey of the JavaScript Programming Language

This document is an introduction to the JavaScript Programming Language for professional programmers. It is a small language, so if you are familiar [e1] with other languages, then this won't be too demanding[e2] .

JavaScript is not Java. They are two very different languages. JavaScript is not a subset of Java. It is not interpreted Java. (Java is interpreted Java!) JavaScript shares C-family syntax with Java, but at a deeper [e3] level it shows greater similarity [e4] to the languages Scheme and Self. It is a small language, but it is also a surprisingly [e5] powerful and expressive [e6] language.You should take a look at it. You will find that it is not a toy language, but a full programming language with many distinctive [e7] properties.

JavaScript is a regular language which won't take much time to learn. It is better suited to some tasks, such as client programming, than Java is. In my own practice, I have found that working with JavaScript has made me a better Java programmer because it introduced me to a useful set of dynamic techniques[e8] .

When JavaScript was first introduced, I dismissed[e9] it as being not worth[e10] my attention. Much later, I took another look at it and discovered that hidden in the browser was an excellent programming language. My initial attitudes[e11] were based on the initial positioning of JavaScript by Sun and Netscape. They made many misstatements[e12] about JavaScript in order to avoid [e13] positioning JavaScript as a competitor [e14] to Java. Those misstatements continue to echo in the scores of badly written JavaScript books aimed [e15] at the dummies and amateurs[e16] market.