Textbook in PDF format

This is a book about JavaScript, programming, and the wonders of the digital.
This is a book about instructing computers. Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but they are quite a bit more complex, and making them do what you want them to do isn’t always easy.
If the task you have for your computer is a common, well-understood one, such as showing you your email or acting like a calculator, you can open the appropriate application and get to work. But for unique or open-ended tasks, there often is no appropriate application.
That is where programming may come in. Programming is the act of constructing a program—a set of precise instructions telling a computer what to do. Because computers are dumb, pedantic beasts, programming is fundamentally tedious and frustrating.
Most programming is done with programming languages. A programming language is an artificially constructed language used to instruct computers. It is interesting that the most effective way we’ve found to communicate with a computer borrows so heavily from the way we communicate with each other. Like human languages, computer languages allow words and phrases to be combined in new ways, making it possible to express ever new concepts. One of them, JavaScript, is built into every modern web browser—and is thus available on almost every device. This book will try to make you familiar enough with this language to do useful and amusing things with it.
In this book, I’m using the 2023 version of JavaScript. This book contains roughly three parts. The first 12 chapters discuss the JavaScript language. The next seven chapters are about web browsers and the way JavaScript is used to program them. Finally, two chapters are devoted to Node.js, another environment to program JavaScript in. There are five project chapters in the book that describe larger example programs to give you a taste of actual programming.
The language part of the book starts with four chapters that introduce the basic structure of the JavaScript language. They discuss control structures (such as the while word you saw in this introduction), functions (writing your own building blocks), and data structures. After these, you will be able to write basic programs. Next, Chapters 5 and 6 introduce techniques to use functions and objects to write more abstract code and keep complexity under control. After a first project chapter that builds a crude delivery robot, the language part of the book continues with chapters on error handling and bug fixing, regular expressions (an important tool for working with text), modularity (another defense against complexity), and asynchronous programming (dealing with events that take time). The second project chapter, where we implement a programming language, concludes the first part of the book.
The second part of the book, Chapters 13 to 19, describes the tools that browser JavaScript has access to. You’ll learn to display things on the screen (Chapters 14 and 17), respond to user input (Chapter 15), and communicate over the network (Chapter 18). There are again two project chapters in this part, building a platform game and a pixel paint program. Chapter 20 describes Node.js, and Chapter 21 builds a small website using that tool.
Introduction
Values, Types, and Operators
Program Structure
Functions
Data Structures: Objects and Arrays
Higher-Order Functions
The Secret Life of Objects
Project: A Robot
Bugs and Errors
Regular Expressions
Modules
Asynchronous Programming
Project: A Programming Language
JavaScript and the Browser
The Document Object Model
Handling Events
Project: A Platform Game
Drawing on Canvas
HTTP and Forms
Project: A Pixel Art Editor
Node.js
Project: Skill-Sharing Website