Learning JavaScript Programming Language Part 1

Intent of my Blog

So finally, i have decided to learn “JavaScript Programming Language”, the world most popular language. In my five years of software development career, i have always tried to run away from learning and working on javascript. But today, i have decided that i will start learning javascript from the beginning. So, in this blog series on javascript i will be sharing my learning on javascript.

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I googled a bit, to find out the best resources to learn javascript and find out the video series by Douglas Crockford.

So, in today’s post i will be writing down the key points from his lecture.I would recommend that you should listen this presentation.

Douglas Crockford: “The JavaScript Programming Language”/1 of 4 @ Yahoo! Video

Key Points from the Presentation:-

1. JavaScript is completely independent of Java.It has nothing to do with java except the name resemblance. (Please listen to presentation to find out why)
2. It is not a scripting language but a complete Functional Programming Language
3. It is the most Popular Programming Language
4. JavaScript has design errors
5. All the books on JavaScript in market are bad except JavaScript the Definitive Guide 4th Edition.
6. The first name of JavaScript was LiveScript which was created by Netscape
7. LiveScript was the first language to be put into the browser.
8. NetScape and Sun Microsystems joined hands and renamed LiveScript to JavaScript
9. NetScape and Sun Microsystems joined hands to beat MicroSoft
10. Microsoft reverse engineered JavaScript to create a language called JScript
11. JavaScript is a small but sophisticated language
12. Key Ideas :-

• Load and go definition – This means that programs are executed as source code as text
• Loose Typing
• Object as generic container
• Prototypal Inheritance — Which means Objects can inherit objects
• lambda -Function as first class objects
• Linkage through global variables

13.  When you use parseInt function always use radix parseInt(“08”,10)
14. JavaScript is case sensitive
15. JavaScript syntactically belongs to C family
16. == and != do type coersion
17. === and !== are faster and more reliable.
18. Bitwise operators are slower because JavaScript does not have Integers to first 64 bit floats are converted to 32 bit integer and then reconverted to 64 bit float.

These were some of the important points from the talk.
I will share my learning on javascript as i move along.