Media (JavaScript Basics)

DUE Tuesday, Apr 10 – 5 points
(Wednesday NOON deadline)

This week, we will be discussing JavaScript. For some of you, this will be your favorite week of the class; others of you will hate it. I just hope this week doesn’t make anyone cry. These four videos should be fairly painless; they provide a basic understanding of the nature and history of JavaScript, along with an introduction to its syntax.

  • The JavaScript Programming Language (00:00-12:47)
    The video player only shows how much time is remaining in the video, so watch from the beginning until there’s 17:57 left.) Douglas Crockford works as a senior JavaScript architect at Yahoo! and is a real JavaScript genius.

    We’re only watching a short bit of this talk from a few years ago — the part on the history and key ideas of JavaScript — because it gets real technical, real fast. (For those of you interested in becoming a serious web developer, I would recommend watching more of Douglas Crockford’s videos on the Yahoo! Developer Network.)

  • JavaScript Tutorials by thenewboston
    These short videos provide a simple introduction to JavaScript syntax and variables. The author mentions that he is not using best practice by not including the HTML elements like <head> and <body> in these videos, but we’ll look at those best practices later this week.

Once you have watched or read these materials, you will need to take a quiz of ten true-false questions. (These questions will be randomly selected from the questions below. You can retake the quiz up to five times. Don’t stress about getting 100% on these quizzes: if you get 80% or better, you will be ready to proceed to the next activity and I will give you full credit.)

All questions should be prefaced with an understood, “According to the author of the material … “:

  1. T/F? JavaScript is a subset of the Java programming language, sometimes accurately referred to as “interpreted Java.”
  2. T/F? JavaScript is a scripting language, not a complete programming language.
  3. T/F? The early implementations of JavaScript were so good that JavaScript has never had a negative reputation.
  4. T/F? The Java programming language got its name from an item on the menu at a coffee shop.
  5. T/F? Netscape looked at Sun Microsystem’s Java programming language and decided they needed something much lighter to build applications that ran in a web browser.
  6. T/F? The European Computer Manufacturers Association is headquartered in Barcelona.
  7. T/F? With JavaScript, the source code is delivered as text to the execution location; it is not compiled.
  8. T/F? One of JavaScript’s key ideas, which Douglas Crockford calls “lambda,” is that functions are treated like first-class objects.
  9. T/F? JavaScript can be embedded in a web page using the HTML <script> element.
  10. T/F? The HTML element containing JavaScript code should have a — class=”text/javascript” — attribute.
  11. T/F? thenewboston describes the echo() function in JavaScript that outputs text on the screen when the code is executed.
  12. T/F? thenewboston mistakenly refers to double quotation marks as “double parentheses.”
  13. T/F? To pass a text value into the document.write() function — or any other function — you must enclose it in single or double quotation marks.
  14. T/F? An error in JavaScript can create a blank screen or an error message, depending on your browser configuration.
  15. T/F? thenewboston describes the alert() function in JavaScript that pops up a little box when the code is executed.
  16. T/F? When you first declare a variable in JavaScript, you must use the code “var” like this — var name = “Randy Hoyt”;
  17. T/F? One of the benefits of variables (in JavaScript and any other programming language) is that they save time by allowing you to make a change in one place that gets applied to other parts of the code automatically.
  18. T/F? The syntax for a decision or a conditional in JavaScript includes the word “if”.
  19. T/F? Do not type a semicolon after the line of JavaScript code describing your decision conditions; the semicolon only comes at the end of the lines of code inside the conditional.
  20. T/F? thenewboston places the JavaScript code to be executed when a given condition is true inside a pair of curly braces: { … }

DUE Tuesday, Apr 10 – 5 points
(Wednesday NOON deadline)