Chapter 1. Essential JavaScript

Welcome to the world of Java Script. This book is your guided tour to that world, so have no worriesyou've come to the right place. That world is large and expanding in unpredictable ways every minute, but we're going to become familiar with the lay of the land in detail here. And there's a lot of territory to cover, because JavaScript is getting into the most amazing places, and in the most amazing ways, these days.

You'll see JavaScript just about everywhere you go on the Internet; it's the language of the web. JavaScript is a powerful, compact scripting language that gets embedded right in web pages, and brings them to life. In this book, we're going to see all of JavaScript at work, from the basics to the most advanced; from mouse rollovers to dynamic HTML; from status bar manipulations to opening new browser windows on command; from working with the mouse and keyboard to handling HTML controls such as buttons , check boxes, and drop-down menus ; from working with XML and XSLT to working with .NET; from using style sheets to setting cookies. JavaScript supports a dazzling variety of options for your web pages, and it's all coming up in this book. We're going to see it all at workand everything is going to be illustrated with at least one example.

This first chapter is our foundation chapter, where we'll get the necessary skills and techniques down to begin our guided tour of the language. To put things into perspective, a good place to start is with a history of JavaScript.