The JavaScript Guide for 2020 :Part 1 [An Overview]

Welcome to the amazing world of JavaScript where we will learn about how to build amazing applications and create some awesome things along the way.

This complete guide is a big project that I am undertaking in order to create a comprehensive series of articles explaining everything one might need to learn about JavaScript in order to become a great developer.

So am I qualified to teach you awesome people about JavaScript? Probably not, I would even say I am definitely not the most qualified person to teach you about JavaScript.

But, I believe what I can do is create a guide for anyone looking into becoming a JavaScript developer just like I am and I would like to document everything that I learn along the way.

So with that out of the way, let’s get to an important question. Why would you want to learn JavaScript?

Why JavaScript?

Apart from its seemingly unending popularity and a lot of high paying job opportunities, JavaScript is the language of the web, in very simple terms JavaScript is a tool for developers to add interactivity to websites.

Whenever you open a website in your browser, three things come into play which allows you to view the website.

HTML:  It Structures the content.
CSS: The website design or style is defined by CSS
JavaScript: It gives your website life!

Of course, it’s not as simple as that but in layman terms, JavaScript determines the behavior of your site.

Now I’d rather not get into a history lesson of JavaScript, how it came to be and it’s life cycle so far, I think Wikipedia is pretty good for that sort of thing though I will tell one of the main reasons why JavaScript is so powerful.

JavaScript is a scripting language that is inserted directly in HTML of a page, in fact, it was the only programming language that could be understood by web browsers. That has since changed, as in 2017 Firefox 52 became the first web browser to support WebAssembly, which is a low-level programming language that can run alongside JavaScript.

Still, JavaScript is a pretty popular language and a lot of organizations rely on it to create their web applications.

Is JavaScript really worth it?

It’s certainly not the best thing since sliced bread, that’s for sure but it is pretty impressive, JavaScript is everywhere.

It is almost impossible to find your way around any application nowadays without some heavy usage of JavaScript in some way or another.

In fact, don’t just take my word for it, In the 2019 Developer Survey done by Stackoverflow, JavaScript pretty much came out on top.

So now that we have established that yes JavaScript is pretty good of a skill to learn, let’s see how we will go about it.

The Methodology

Now I won’t be creating this guide as a single 100,000 words long post, that to me seems like a very daunting task and one I think I would like to avoid doing.

I will be posting a series of posts and create an ordered set of lessons that you can follow along with me or just use it as a reference if you ever need to do so.

I will also be doing a few projects along the way but that will come in the latter part of the series in the following weeks to come.

I hope you are as excited as I am about the whole guide, I am probably way more excited about it 😛 

Till next time when we actually delve into JavaScript for the first time!

Find the Guide Map

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