Why JavaScript?

JavaScript conventions

One convention you will often see in JavaScript is camel case. It joins words without spaces and capitalizes the beginning of each word after the first. For example, “this is boring” becomes thisIsBoring. You will see this style in variable names, function names, and sometimes filenames.

Another familiar feature is zero-based indexing. Like many programming languages, JavaScript starts counting array positions from zero.

Why learn JavaScript?

JavaScript is one of the three central technologies of the web, alongside HTML and CSS. HTML structures a page, while CSS styles it. CSS can also provide animations and interactions such as hover effects, but JavaScript lets us implement more general behavior and logic.

JavaScript is useful beyond the browser, too: Node.js runs it on the backend. That makes it a valuable language for web developers to learn.

The original 2022 post cited JavaScript usage on 95% of websites and described the language as very easy to learn. Treat that percentage as a historical statement from the original article, not a current measurement. The practical point remains that JavaScript is a widely used and approachable starting point for web programming.

In the next lesson, we will begin working with the language itself.