Introduction to JavaScript

This is the first of three stages of the JavaScript Courses.

The course is designed for those students who wish to start using JavaScript and who have little or no experience with it.

Students will find the course challenging but rewarding, and will start you on the first part of the trail to develop fully interactive web pages. Success in this course opens the door for you to move on to the Intermediate JavaScript and Advanced JavaScript courses.

Students who have already played with editing pre-written scripts will find this course useful, as it will fill in the gaps in your knowledge and allow you to develop your own scripts.

Some of the assignments produced by past students can be viewed here.

Some of the comments past students have written about this course can be read here.

Prerequisites

It is important that you embark on this course with some background knowledge of web design. To this end there are some prerequisites to this course.

  1. A full understanding of HTML

  2. An understanding of FTP and how to upload pages to a web server

System Requirements

It is a requirement to have Internet Explorer 5.5 or later and Netscape 4.79 and Netscape 6.2 or later (or Mozilla 1.2 or later) (or Mac equivalents) installed for this course.

There are a couple of reasons why we still use the old Netscape 4 browser

  1. There are still more people using Netscape 4 than both Netscape 6 & 7

  2. Netscape 4 is a very picky browser, if you get the code just slightly wrong it doesn't like it. This means that you have to learn to write very accurate code...which is good

Web space for posting your assignments is also required. It is preferable not to use Web space that adds banner ads to your pages as this can interfere with your assignment code.

Students are encouraged to use Scribbler (the best JavaScript Editor there is) during the course. A trial version of Scribbler can be downloaded from here 2.1Mb. For MAC users I can suggest BBEdit, but I have never been able to test it as I am a PC user.

Syllabus