✍️ JavaScript Everywhere: Book Preface
JavaScript Everywhere is now officially available in digital form wherever fine ebooks are sold and will be hitting physical shelves over the next couple of weeks. To celebrate, I wanted to share the preface to the book. I’d love to know what you all think - if you read this, hit the reply button to let me know. 💖
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Preface
In 1997 I was a junior in high school. A friend and I were goofing
around with the web-connected computer in our school library when he
showed me that you could click View > Source to see the underlying
code of a web page. A few days later, another friend showed me how to
publish my own HTML. My mind was blown.
After that, I was hooked. I went around borrowing the bits of the websites I liked to construct my own Franken-site. I spent much of my free time at the pieced-together computer in my family’s dining room tinkering away. I even “wrote” (OK, copied and pasted) my first JavaScript, to implement hover styles on links, which was not yet doable with simple CSS.
And in a turn of events that I’ve come to think of as a nerdy and wholesome version of the film Almost Famous, my homegrown music site gained reasonable popularity. Because of this, I received promotional CDs in the mail and was put on the guest list at concerts. More important to me, however, was that I was sharing my interests with other people around the world. I was a bored suburban teenager, in love with music, and was able to reach people I’d never meet. That was, and still is, such an empowering feeling.
Today, we can build powerful applications using only web technologies,
but it can be daunting to get started. APIs are an invisible background
that serves up data. View > Source shows concatenated and minified
code. Authentication and security are mystifying. Putting all of these
things together can be overwhelming. If we’re able to look beyond these
confusing details, we may notice that the same technologies I was
fiddling with 20-some years ago can now be used to build powerful web
applications, code native mobile applications, create powerful desktop
applications, design 3D animations, and even program robots.
As an educator, I’ve found that many of us learn best by building new things, taking them apart, and adapting them for our own use cases. That is the goal of this book. If you know some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript but are unsure of how to take those components and build the robust applications that you’ve dreamed up, this book is for you. I’ll guide you through building an API that can power the user interfaces of a web application, a native mobile application, and a desktop application. Most importantly, you’ll gain an understanding of how all of these pieces fit together so that you can build and create wonderful things.
I can’t wait to see what you make.
— Adam