Using This Book

Throughout this book, you will find a variety of different sections and practice exercises. We are writing this guide to help you make the most of the book.

Concept Checks

Many pages end with a “Check Your Understanding” header. This section is full of questions for you to double check that you understand the concepts in the reading. Although your score does not count towards your final grade in the class, you should use it to help evaluate your understanding of the main concepts. After you read the chapter, you will take a quiz in Canvas that includes all of these questions.

Examples

Examples are times when we tie a concept we have just learned to a potential real world application.

The label “Try It” signals an example that includes code you can modify and augment to quickly reinforce what you have just read. Open up your code editor and play around with these!

Supplemental Content

Occasionally, you will find a link to another resource. While not required reading, these additional resources can boost your learning with videos, other examples, and more information about the code.

JavaScript in Context

Our approach is different from other ways you can learn JavaScript. The book focuses on programming fundamentals. These fundamentals are problem-solving and transferable concepts. While we will cover the exact way to perform certain tasks in JavaScript, we want to remind you that these tasks are relatively common and many programming languages have ways to carry them out. As you review them, focus on learning what the concept is and how it works to ensure that you are reading to cover the same concept in another language. In reality, software applications are not just one language. Many of them require you to use multiple programming languages together to accomplish the goal. So as you progress in your career and start building these complex applications, you may have to learn more programming languages!