Reading Material JavaScript Week 1

Agenda

These are the topics for week 1:

Refresher on JavaScript building blocks
- Variables
- Values
- Statements / Expressions
- Operators
- Conditional Statements
- Functions
Refresher on debuggers
Loops
Naming conventions
Testing code
- Assertion

Week goals

All of the detailed information about every concept is in your study book. The following goal explanation will link you to the correct place to get studying. Read through the goal description once to get an idea of what you will be learning, then go through the different links and look at them in detail.

Welcome to week 1 of JavaScript! Time to get coding, let's start with refreshing the things we learned during the explore module. Have a look at week 3 there again to remind yourself what the following concepts mean again:

Variables
Values
Statements / Expressions
Operators
Conditional Statements

Then have a look at functions again over here.

This week we are going to go a little deeper and get some extra building blocks to work with. Another cool thing we can do in JavaScript is repeat actions, we can do that using a concept called loops, read more about that here.

You now have all of the basic building blocks that form the basis of all code! You will undoubtedly already have encountered the difficulty of reading code, and combining everything this week will make it even more difficult to follow. It is a good idea to revisit the debugger section with this new knowledge here. Although it is called debugging, a lot of the process of finding 'bugs' in your code is trying to understand what is happening in the code. So keep using the debugger to understand pieces of code that you are not 100% comfortable with yet!

This is also the week we are going to start learning about best practices surrounding programming. These are general rules programmers follow so that code remains readable for others. The first will be about naming conventions, read more about that here and try to make it a habit to follow them.

Lastly we want to introduce the first steps to testing code. Let's first have a look at what software testing is and why we do it here. The simplest form of testing is using assertions, have a look what that is here, we will introduce this more in your assignment so you will see how it works.

Finished?

Are you finished with going through the materials? You're doing great! If you feel ready to get practical, click here.