Course Overview

[00:00:00]
>> Kyle Simpson: As a quick overview of what to expect, we're gonna start as I said with a quick primer on programming concepts. And we'll look at things like statements and expressions and variables. So, we'll fill in any gaps that may exist for you there. And then we're going to dive into the three pillars of the JavaScript language.

[00:00:18]
This is only my opinion on how to divide up the various features, but I think these are the three main areas that you'll spend focusing. And just to set some expectation, these are not things that you learn in one day. You could take one of these units and spend weeks or even months, potentially even years learning.

[00:00:35]
I'm 20 plus years at this, I'm still learning bits and pieces, and figuring these things out. So really the best way to approach this is not like I wanna, get I wanna check something off in my and spread sheet but really I want to approach this is a continual ever sort of learning thing.

[00:00:52]
You're starting out in the journey to learn how to do programming, learn how to do Java script ,and I want you to embrace that as a constant thing that you will journey throughout your entire career. So the three pillars that we want to look at. Number one, we're gonna look at types and coercion.

[00:01:07]
And again, if those words don't make sense, don't worry, we'll talk exactly what all those things mean. But we're gonna look at scope and scope enables us to talk about closures which is a very critical feature. And finally we're gonna look at the this keyword and the prototypes.

[00:01:21]
And so if you've never heard of any of those things that's great you're in the right spot, maybe you have heard of some of those things but they're confusing or you've just seen them used in a library or a framework or on a stack overflow post. You weren't really quite sure what they meant.

[00:01:34]
We want to take a little bit of a deeper dive into it. And again, just as a reminder, the book is where you go next, after anything that you've learned here in this course, go into the book. It'll start to give you more of that information and then it'll push you into the rest of the book series, which dives really deep into each of these topics.

[00:01:52]
Before we go on, though, I want you to hear a little bit about my thoughts on why we code, which is that we code so that the things that we write are readable to human beings. So let's dive into a primer on basic programming concepts. And here's a quick list of the concepts that we wanna look at.

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We'll look at one or two code examples for each one of these to sort of illustrate what does that mean and where does it fit in the overall scheme of things? Just like if you were an English major, you need to learn about the English language. Well, we need to learn about the process of speaking a language, and we are gonna do so in the context of JavaScript, obviously, that's what this course is about.

[00:02:32]
But these are the basic things, that you'll actually find in any programming language. So, if you have done a programming language before, in your mind, you'll think, I know, I used to do a function this way in that language and now, that's how I do that in JavaScript.

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So look for those sorts of connections. And if this is your first programming language, you'll be able to take these as your foundation and use those to learn another programming language at some point. So we'll look at values, those are things like the number 42 or the string hello world.

[00:03:01]
We'll look at operations, things that we do like 42 + 1. We'll look at variables which is where we store those values and then where we access them later. Expressions and statements. That's really again back to the sort of English grammar. An expression is kind of like a phrase in a sentence and a statement is a whole sentence with a period at the end.

[00:03:20]
We'll look at decisions. Deciding whether or not to do something or to do something else. We look at loops repeating things over and over again. And finally we look at functions. These are the building blocks that make up a program, make up the logic the instructions that we give to the computer through our programming.